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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at |http : //books . google . com/ NKDl THANSFKU HN "b'nVR/ ,The GHT TO BE Lazy AND OTHER STUDIES ÂFAH Men w/ J2-é î^arbarlr College Eiftrarg LIBRARY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL ETHICS FROM THE FRANCIS GREENWOOD PEABODY ENDOWMENT FUND y Google y Google I by Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY AND OTHER STUDIES BT PAUL LAVARGUE Ttaaaiattd by CHARLES H. KBKK CHICAGO CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY oo-onxATivs y Google K^ ^i'/ 1 Harvard lin-versity, Dept of Social Ethics. iAtVABDCOUEeEUBBABV TMN8FERRED FROM THE LIBRARY OF THE BEPARTHENT OF SOCIAL ETHICS 7 Copyright, 1907 By Charles H. Kebr & Company JOHN F. HIGGINS PRINTER AND BINDER 80 376-382 MONROE STREET CHICAGO. ILLINOIS y Google PREFACE M. Thiers, at a private session of the com- iiission on primary education of 1849, said : "I Tvish to make the influence of the clergy all- powerful because I count upon it to propagate that good philosophy which teaches man that he is here below to suffer, and not that other philos- ophy which on the contrary bids man to enjoy." M. Thiers was stating the ethics of the capital- ist class, whose fierce egoism and narrow intel- ligence he incarnated. The Bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism ; but once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to support its economic and political supremacy. In the fifteenth and six- teenth centuries, it had joyfully taken up the pagan tradition and glorified the flesh and its passions, reproved by Christianity; in our days, gorged with goods and with pleasures, it denies 3 Digitized by VjOOQIC 4 PREFACE the teachings of its thinkers like Rabelais and £)iderot, and preaches abstinence to the wage- workers. Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody on Qiristian ethics, strikes with its anathema the flesh of the laborer; its ideal is to reduce the producer to the smallest number of needs, to suppress his joys and his passions and to con- demn him to play the part of a machine turning out work without respite and without thanks. The revolutionary socialists must take up again the battle fought by the philosophers and pamphleteers of the bourgeoisie; they must march up to the assault of the ethics and the social theories of capitalism ; they must demolish in the heads of the class which they call to ac- tion the prejudices sown in them by the ruling class; they must proclaim in the faces of the hypocrites of all ethical systems that the earth shall cease to be the vale of tears for the laborer ; that in the communist society of the future, which we shall establish "peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must," the impulses of men will be given a free rein, for "all these impulses are by nature good, we have nothing to avoid but their misuse and their excesses,*" and they will not be avoided except by their mutual counter- * Descartes. "Les Passions de Tame.** y Google PREFACE 5 ^aiancing, by the harmonious development of the human organism, for as Dr. Beddoe says, "It is only when a race reaches its maximum of physical development, that it arrives at its highest point of energy and moral vigor/' Such was also the opinion of the great naturalist Charles Darwin.* This refutation of the "Right to Work" which I am republishing with some additional notes ap- peared in the weekly "Egalité", 1880, second series. P. L. Sainte-Pélagie Prison, 1883. * Doctor Beddoe. "Memoirs of th« AnthropoloiTteal Society. Charles Darwin. "Descent of ICan.** y Google y Google TABLE OF CONTENTS «Hfî RIGHT TO BE LAZY- Page I. A Disastrous Dogrma, 9 II. Blessingrs of Work 14 III. The Consequences of Over-Productlon 30 IV. New Songrs to New Music 48 Appendix 57 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 63 THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM 103 THE WOMAN QUESTION Ill THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 139 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN 157 y Google y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY Let us be lazy in everythinsr, except in lov- ing and drinkiner, except in beins lazy. --LeBBlng. A DISASTROUS DOGMA. A strange delusion possesses the working clas- ses of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have y Google 10 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christ- ian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free- thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society. In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity. Compare the thorough-bred in Rothschild's stables, served by a retinue of bi- peds, with the heavy brute of the Norman farms which plows the earth, carts the manure, hauls the crops. Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syph- ilis and the dogma of work, and then look at our miserable slaves of machines.* ♦ European explorers pause in wonder before the physical beauty and the proud bearing of the men of primitive races, not soiled by what Paepplgr calls "th« poisonous breath of civilization." Speaking: of the ab- origrines of the Oceanic Islands. Lord George Campbell writes: "There is not a people in the world which strikes one more favorably at first sight. Their smooth skin of a light copper tint, their hair golden and curly, their beautiful and happy faces, in a word, their whole person formed a new and splendid speci- men of the 'genus homo'; their physical appearance gave the impression of a race superior to ours." The civilized men of ancient Rome, witness Caesar and Tacitus, regarded with the same admiration the Qer* mant of the communist tribes which invaded the Ro- man empire. Following Tacitus, Salvien, the prleajt of the fifth century who received the surname of matter of the Bishops, held up the barbarians as an exampU y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 11 When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic prejud- ices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work. Spain, which, alas, is degenerating, may still boast of possessing fewer factories than we have of prisons and barracks; but the artist rejoices in his admiration of the hardy Andalusian, brown as his native chestnuts, straight and flexible as a steel rod ; and the heart leaps at hearing the beg- to civilized Cliristians: "We are Immodest before the barbarians, who are more chaste than we. Even more» the barbarians are wounded at our lack of modesty; the Goths do not permit debauchees of their own n'a- tion to remain among them; alone in the midst of them, by the sad privilège of their nationality and their name, the Romans have the right to be impure. (Pederasty was then the height of the fashion among both pagans and Christians.) The oppressed fly to the barbarians to seek for mercy and a shelter." (ï>e Gubernatione Dei.) The old civilization and the rising Christianity corrupted the barbarians of the ancient world,^s the old Christianity and the modern capital- ist civilization are corrupting the savages of the new world. V M. P. LePlay, whose talent for observation mum be recognized, even if we reject his sociological conclu- sions, tainted with philanthropic and Christian phuri- saism, says in his book "Les Ouvriers Européens" (1885): "The Propensity of the Bachkirs for laziness (the Bachkirs are semi-nomadic shepherds of the Asi- atic slope of the Ural mountains) ; the leisure of nom- ^.dic life, the habit of meditation which this engenders in the best endowed individuals,— all this often gives them a distinction of manner, a fineness of intelligence and judgement which is rarely to be observed on the same social level in a more developed civilization The thing most repugnawt to them Is agricultural labor; they will do anything rather than accept the trade of a farmer." Agriculture Is In fact the flr^t ex- ample of servile labor In the history of man. Accord- ing to biblical tradition, the first criminal, Caip, U « farmer. y Google 12 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY gar, superbly draped in his ragge3 capa, parleying on terms of equality with the duke of Qssuna. For the Spaniard, in whom the primitive animal has not been atrophied, work is the worst sort of slavery.* The Greeks in their era of great- ness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. And so it was in this era that men like Aristotle, Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed among the people ; it was the time when a hand- ful of heroes at Marathon crushed the hordes of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods : O Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit, f Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin : and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example of ideal * The Spanish proverb says: Descanzar es salud. (Rest is healthful.) t O Mellbaeus! a god has granted us this idleness. Virgil's Bucolics. (See appendix.) y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 13 laziness ; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity. On the other hand, what are the races for which work is an organic necessity? The Auvei^nians; the Scotch, those Auvergnians of the British Isles; the Galicians, those Auvergn- ians of Spain; the Pomeranians, those Auvergn- ians of Germany ; the Chinese, those Auvergnians of Asia. In our society, which are the classes that love work for work's sake? The peasant proprietors, the little shopkeepers; the former bent double over their fields, the latter crouched in their shops, burrow like the mole in his sub- terranean passage and never stand up to look at nature leisurely. And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class- embracing all the producers of civilized nations, the class which in freeing itself will free human- ity from servile toil and will make of the human animal a free being, — tfie proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its historic mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work. y Google 14 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY II. BLESSINGS OF WORK. In 1770 at London, an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title, "An Essay on Trade and Commerce". It made some stir in its time. The author, a great philanthropist, was indignant that "the factory population of England had taken into its head the fixed idea that in their quality of Englishmen all the individuals compos- ing it have by right of birth the privilege ol being freer and more independent than the labor- ers of any country in Europa. This idea may have its usefulness for soldiers, since it stimul- ates their valor, but the less the factory workers are imbued with it the better for themselves and the state. Laborers ought never to look on themselves . as independent of their superiors. It is extremely dangerous to encourage such in- fatuations in a commercial state like ours, where perhaps seven-eighths of the population have lit^ tie or no property. The cure will not be complete until our industrial laborers are contented to work six days for the same sum which they now earn in four." Thus, nearly a century before Guizot, work was openly preached in London as a curb to the noble passions of man. "The more my people work, the less vices they will have", Digitized by LjOOQIC THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 15 wrote Napoleon on May 5th, 1807, from Osterod. "I am the authority and I should be disposed to order that on Sunday after the hour of service be past, the shops be opened and the laborers return to their work/' To root out laziness and curb the sentiments of pride and independence which arise from it, the author of the '"^Essay on Trade" proposed to imprison the poor in ideal "work-houses", which should become "houses of terror, where they should work four- teen hours a day in such fashion that when meal time was deducted there should remain twelve hours of work full and complete". Twelve hours of work a day, that is the ideal oi the philanthropists and moralists of the eight- eenth century. How have we outdone this nee plus filtra! Modern factories have become ideal houses of correction in which the toiling masses are imprisoned, in which they are condemned to compulsory work for twelve or fourteen hours, not the men only but also women and children.* And to think that the sons of the heroes of the Terror have allowed themselves to be degraded ♦ At the first Congress of Charities held at Brussels In 1857 one of the richest manufacturers of Marquette, near Lille, M. Scrlve, to the plaudits of the members of the congress declared with the noble satisfaction of a duty performed: "We have Introduced certain methods of diversion for the children. We teach them to sing during their work, also to count while work- y Google 16 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY by the religion of work, to the point of accept- ing, since 1848, as a revolutionary conquest, the law limiting factory labor to twelve hours. They proclaim as a revolutionary principle the Right to Work. Shame to the French" proletariat! Only slaves would have been capable of such baseness. A Greek of the heroic times would have required twenty years of capitalist civiliza- tion before he could have conceived such vile^ ness. And if the miseries of compulsory work and the tortures of hunger have descended upon the proletariat more in number than the locusts of the Bible, it is because the proletariat itself invited them. This work, which in June 1848 the laborers demanded with arms in their hands, this they have imposed on their families; they have delivered up to the barons of industry their wives and children. With their own hands they have demolished their domestic hearths. With their own hands they have dried up the milk of their wives. The unhappy women carrying and nursing their babes have been obliged to go into ingr. That distracts them and makes them accept bravely "those twelve hours of labor which are neces- sary to procure their means of existence." Twelve hours of labor, and such labor, imposed on children less than twelve years old! The materialists will al- ways regret that there is no hell in which to confine these Christian philanthropic murderers of childhood. y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 17 the mines and factories to bend their backs and exhaust their nerves. With their own hands they have broken the life and the vigor of their children. Shame on the proletarians! Where are those neighborly housewives told of in our fables and in our old tales, bold and frank of speech, lovers of Bacchus? Where are those buxom girls, always on the move, always cook- ing, always singing, always spreading life, en- gendering life's joy, giving painless birth to healthy and vigorous children? Today .we have factory girls and women, pale drooping flowers, with impoverished blood, with disord- ered stomachs, with languid limbs They have never known the pleasure of a healthful passion, nor would they be capable of telling of it merrily ! And the children ? Twelve hours of work for children! O, misery. But not all the Jules Simon of the Academy of Moral and Political Science, not all the Germinys of Jesuit- ism, could have invented a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the children, more cor- rupting of their instincts, more destructive of their organism than work in the vitiated atmos- phere of the capitalist factory. Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption* Digitized by VjOOQIC U TUE RICrHT TO BE LAZY And all the while the philosophers, the bourge- ois economists — from the painfully confused August Comte to the ludicrously clear Leroy- Beaulieu; the people of bourgeois literature — from the quackishly romantic Victor Hugo to the artlessly grotesque Paul de Kock, — all have intoned nauseating songs in honor of the god Progress, the eldest son of Work. Listen to them and you would think that happiness was soon to reign over the earth, that its coming was already perceived. They rummaged in the dust of past centuries to bring back feudal miser- ies to serve as a sombre contrast to the delights of the present times. Have they wearied us, these satisfied people, yesterday pensioners at the table of the nobility, today pen-valets of the capitalist class and fatly paid? Have they reck- oned us weary of the peasant, such as La Bruyère described him? Well, here is the brilliant pict- ure of proletarian delights in the year of capital- ist progress 1840, penned by one of their own men. Dr. Villermé, member of the Institute, the same who in 1848 was a member of that scient- ific society (Thiers, Cousin, Passy, Blanqui, the academician, were in it), which disseminated among the masses the nonsense of bourgeois économies and ethics. It is of manufacturing Alsace that Dr. Vil- y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 19 lermé speaks, — the Alsace of Kestner and Doll- fus, those flowers of industrial philanthropy and republicanism. But before the doctor raiseè up before us his picture of proletarian miseries, let us listen to an Alsatian manufacturer, Mr. Th. Mieg, of the house of Dollfus, Mieg & Co., depicting the condition of the old-time artisan: "At Mulhouse fifty years ago (in 1813, when modern mechanical industry was just arising) the laborers were all children of the soil, in- habiting the town and the surrounding villages, and almost all owning a house and often a little field."* It was the golden age of the laborer. But at that time Alsatian industry did not deluge the world with its cottons, nor make millionaires out of its Dollfus and Koechlin. But twenty-five years after, when Villermé visited Alsace, the modern Minotaur, the capitalist workshop, had conquered the country; in its insatiable appetite for human labor it had dragged the workmen from their hearths, the better to wring them and press out the labor which they contained. It was by thousands that the workers flocked to- gether at the signal of the steam whistle. "A great number", says Villermé, "five thousand • Speech delivered before the International Society of Practical Studies In Social Economics, at Paris In May 1S68. and published In the French "EcoBontart*' of the same epoch. y Google 80 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY out of seventeen thousand, were obliged by high rents to lodge in neighboring villages. Some of them lived three or four miles from the fac- tory where they worked.* ''At Mulhouse in Dornach, work began at five o'clock in the morning and ended at eight o'clock in the evening, summer and winter. It was a sight to watch them arrive each morning into the city and depart each evening. Among them were a multitude of women, pale, often walk- ing bare-footed through the mud, and who for lack of umbrellas when the rain or snow fell, wore their aprons or skirts turned up over their hoads. There was a still larger number of young children, equally dirty, equally pale, covered with rags, greasy from the machine oil which drops on them while they work. They were better protected from fhe rain because their clothes shed water; but unlike the women just mentioned, they did not carry their day's provisions in a basket, but they carryed in their hands or hid under their clothing as best they might, the morsel of bread which must serve them as food until time for them to return home. Thus to the strain of an insufferably long * Note that this was before the era of railroads and •tr«et cars. (Translator.) y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 31 day— at /east fifteen hours— is added for these wretches the fatigue of the painful daily jour- neys. Consequently they reach home over- whelmed by the need of sleep, and next day they rise before they are completely rested in order to reach the factory by the opening time." Now, look at the holes in which were packed îhose who lodge in the town: "I saw at Mul- house in Dornach, and the neighboring houses, some of those miserable lodgings where two families slept each in its corner on straw thrown on the floor and kept in its place by two planks. This wretchedness among the laborers of the cotton industry in the department of the up- per Rhine is so extreme that it produces this sad result, that while in the families of the manufacturers, merchants, shop-keepers or factory superintendents, half of the children reach their twenty-first year, this same half ceases to exist before the lapse of two years in the families of weavers and cotton spinners." Speaking of the labor of the workshop, Vil- lermé adds: "It is not a work, a task, it is a torture and it is inflicted on children of six to eight years. It is this long torture day after day which wastes away the laborers in the cot- ton spinning factories". And as to the dura- tion of the work Villerme observes, that the y Google 2% THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY convicts in prisons work but ten hours, the slaves in the west Indies work but nine hours, while there existed in France after its Revolu- tion of 1789, which had proclaimed the pompous Rights of Man "factories where the day was sixteen hours, out of which the laborers were allowed only an hour and a half for meals."*^ What a miserable abortion of the revolution- ary principles of the bourgeoisie! What woeful gifts from its god Progress! The philanthrop- ists hail as benefactors of humanity those who having done nothing to become rich, give work to the poor. Far better were it to scatter pesti- lence and to poisen the springs than to erect a capitalist factory in the midst of a rural popula- tion. Introduce factory work, and farewell joy, health and liberty; farewell to all that makes life beautiful and worth Hving.f And the economists go on repeating to the • L. R. Vlllermé. "Tableau de l'état physique et moral des ouvriers dans les fabriques de coton, de laine et de soie (1840). It is not because Dollfup. Koechlin and other Alsacian manufacturers were re- publicans, patriots and protestant philanthropists that they treated their laborers in this way, for Blanqui, the academician, Reybaud, the prototype of Jerome Paturot, and Jules Simon, have observed the same amenities for the working class among the very catholic and monarchical manufacturers of Lille and Lyons, These are capitalist virtues which harmonize dellghtfuly with all political and religious convictions. tThe Indians of the warlike tribes of Brazil kill their invalids and old people; they show their affec- tlon for them by putting an end to a life which is no longer enlivened by combats, feasts and dances. All y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY %S laborers, "Work, to increase social w«ilth", and nevertheless an economist, Destutt de Tracy, answers: "It is in poor nations that people are comfortable, in rich nations they are ordinarily poor"; and his disciple Cherbuliez contirtues: "The laborers themselves in coH>perating toward the accumulation of productive capital contri- bute to the event which sooner or later must deprive them of a part of their wages". But deafened and stupified by their own bowlings, the economists answer : ** Work, always work, to create your prosperity", and in the name of Christian meekness a priest of the Anglican Church, the Rev. Mr. Townsbend, intones: Work, work, night and day. By working you make your poverty increase and your poverty releases us from imposing work upon you by force of law. The legal imposition of woric "gives too much trouble, requires too much violence and makes too much noise. Hunger, on the contrary, is not only a pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the most natural motive for work and industry, it primitive peoples have given these proofs of affection to their relatives: the Massagretae of the Caspian Bu^ (Herodotus), as well as the Wens of Germany and the Celts of Gaul. In the churches of Sweden even lately they preserved clubs called family clubs which served to deliver parents from the sorrows of old age. How degenerate are the modern proletarians to accept with patience the terrible miseries of factory laborl y Google 2é THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY also provokes to the most powerful efforts/* Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your in«'Vidual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist produc- tion. Because, lending ear to the fallacious words of the economists, the proletarians have given themselves up body and soul to the vice of work, they precipitate the whole of society into these industrial crises of over-production which con- vulse the social organism. Then because there is a plethora of merchandise and a dearth of pur- chasers, the shops are closed and hunger scour- ges the working people with its whip of a thousand lashes. The proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, not understanding that the over-work which they have inflicted upon them- selves during the time of pretended prosperity is the cause of their present misery, do not run to the granaries of wheat and cry: "We are hungry, we wish to eat. True we have not a red cent, but beggars as we are, it is we, neverthe- less, who harvested the wheat and gathered the grapes.'' They do not besiege the warehouse of Bonnet, or Jujurieux, the inventor of in- dustrial convents, and cry out: "M. Bonnet, y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY ^ here are your working women, silk workers, spinners, weavers; they are shivering pitifully ynder their patched cotton dresses, yet it is they who have spun and woven the silk robes of the fashionable women of all Christendom. The poor creatures working thirteen hours a day, had no time to think of their toilet. Now, they are out of work and have time to rustle in the silks they have made. Ever since they lost their milk teeth they have devoted themselves to your fortune and have lived in abstinence. Now they are at leisure and wish to enjoy a little of the fruits of their labor. Come, M. Bonnet, give thefli your silks, M. Harmel shall furnish his muslins, M. Pouyer-Quertier his calicos, M. Pinet his boots for their dear little feet, cold and damp. Clad from top to toe and gleeful, they will be delightful to look at. Come, no evasions, you are a friend of humanity, are you not, and a Christian into the bargain? Put at the disposal of your working girls the fortune they have built up for you out of their flesh ; you want to help business, get your goods into circu- lation, — here are consumers ready at hand. Give them unlimited credit. You are simply compel- led to give credit to merchants whom you do not know from Adam or Eve, who have given you nothing, not even a glass of water. Your y Google 26 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY working women will pay the debt the best they can. If at maturity they let their notes go to protest, and if they have nothing to attach, you can demand that they pay you in prayers. They will send you to paradise better than your black- gowned priests steeped in tobacco." Instead of taking advantage of periods of crisis, for a general distribution of their products and a universal holiday, the laborers, perishing with hunger, go and beat their heads against the doors of the workshops. With pale faces, emaciated bodies, pitiful speeches they assail the manufacturers: "Good M. Chagot, sweet M. Schneider, give us woric, it is not hunger, but tlie passion for work which torments us". And these wretches, who have scarcely the strength to stand upright, sell twelve and fourteen hours of work twice as cheap as when they had bread on the table. And the philanthropists of indus- try xprofit by their lockouts to manufacture at lower cost. If industrial crises follow periods of over- work as inevitably as night follows day, bring- ing after them lockouts and poverty without end, they also lead to inevitable bankruptcy. So long as the manufacturer has credit he gives free rein to the rage for work. He borrows, and borrows again, to furnish raw material to y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 27 his laborers, and goes on producing without considering that the market is becoming satiated and that if his goods don't happen to be sold, his notes will still come due. At his wits' end, he implores the banker, he throws himself at his feet, offering his blood, his honor. "A little gold will do my business better", answers the Rothschild. "You have 20,000 pairs of hose in your warehouse; they are worth 20c. I will take them at 4c." The banker gets possession of the goods and sells them at 6c or 8c, and pockets certain frisky dollars which owe nothing to anybody: but the manufacturer has stepped back for a better leap. At last the crash comes and the warehouses disgorge. Then so much merchandise is thrown out of the window that you cannot imagine how it came in by the door. Hundreds of millions are required to figure the value of the goods that are destroyed. In the last century they were burned or thrown into the water.* But before reaching this decision, the manu- facturers travel the world over in search of markets for the goods which *are heaping up. They force their government to annex Congo, • At the Industrial Congress held In Berlin In Jan. 21, ^«79, the losses in the iron industry of Germany durins the last crisis were estimated at $109,066,000^ y Google 28 THE RÎGHl' TO BE LAZY to seize on Tonquin, to batter down the Qiinese Wall with cannon shots to make an outlet for their cotton goods. In previous centuries it was a duel to the death between France and Eng- land as to which should have the exclusive pri- vilege of selling to America and the Indies. Thousands of young and vigorous men reddened the seas with their blood during the colonial wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eight- eenth centuries. There is a surplus of capital as well as of goods. The financiers no longer know where to place it. Then they go among the happy nations who are loafing in the sun smoking cigarettes and they lay down railroads, erect factories and import the curse of work. And this exportation of French capital ends one fine morning in diplomatic complications. In Egypt, for example, France, England and Germany were on the point of hairpulling to decide which usurers shall be paid first. Or it ends with wars like that in Mexico where French soldiers are sent to play the part of constables to collect bad debts.* ♦ M. Clemenceau's "Justice" said on April 6, 1880, in its financial department: "We have heard this opin- ion maintained, that even without pressure the bil- lions of the war of 1870 would have been equally lost for France, that is under the form of loans periodic- ally put out to balance the budgets of forelgrn coun* y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 29 These individual and social miseries, however great and innumerable they may be, however eternal they appear, will vanish like hyenas and jackals at the approach of the lion, when the proletariat shall say ^*I will". But to arrive at the realization of its strength the proletariat must trample under foot the prejudices of Christian ethics, economic ethics and free-thought ethics. It must return to its natural instincts, it must proclaim the Rights of Laziness^ a thousand times more noble and more sacred than the anaemic Rights of Man concocted by the meta- physical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. It must accustom itself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the day and night for leisure and feasting. Thus far my task has been easy; I have had but to describe real evils well known, alas, by all of us; but to convince the proletariat that the ethics innoculated into it is wicked, that the unbridled work to which it has given itself up for the last hundred years is the most terrible tries; this is also our opinion." The loss of English capital on loans of South American Republics is esti- mated at a binion dollars. The French laborers not only produced the billion dollars paid Bismarck, but they continued to pay interest on the war indemnity to Ollivier, Oirardin, Bazaine and other income draw- ers, who brought on the war and the rout. Neverthe- less they still have one shred of consolation; these billions will not bring on a war of reprUaL y Google 80 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY scourge that has ever struck humanity, that work will become a mere condiment to the pleasures of idleness, a beneficial exercise to the human organism, a passion useful to the social organ- ism only when wisely regulated and limited to a maximum of three hours a day; this is an arduous task beyond my strength. Only com- munist physiologists, hygienists and economists could undertake it. In the following pages I shall merely try to show that given the modern means of production and their unlimited repro- ductive power it is necessary to curb the ex- travagant passion of the laborers for work and to oblige them to consume the goods which they produce. III. THE CONSEQUENCES OF OVER-PRODUCTION. A Greek poet of Cicero's time, Antiparos, thus sang of the invention of the water-mill (for grinding grain), which was to free the slave women and bring back the Golden Age : "Spare the arm which turns the mill, O, millers, and sleep peacefully. Let the cock warn you in vain that day is breaking. Demeter has imposed up- on the n)miphs the labor of the slaves, and be- hold them leaping merrily over the wheel, and y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 81 behold the axle tree, shaken, turning with its spokes and making the heavy rolling stone rev- olve. Let us live the life of our fathers, and let us rejoice in idleness over the gifts that the goddess grants us." Alas !, the leisure which the pagan poet announced has not come. The blind, perverse and murderous passion for work trans- forms the liberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men. Its product- iveness impoverishes them. A good workingwoman makes with her need- les only five meshes a minute, while certain circular knitting machines make 30,000 in the same time. Every minute of the machine is thus equivalent to a hundred hours of the work- ingwomen's labor, or again, every minute of the machine's labor, gives the workingwomen ten days of rest. What is true for the knitting in- dustry is more or less true for all industries reconstructed by modem machinery. But what do we see? In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest (times, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competi- tion! That the competition of man and the machine Digitized by VjOOQIC 32 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY might have free course, the proletarians have abolished wise laws which limited the labor of the artisans of the ancient guilds; they have suppressed the holidays.* Because the produc- ers of that time worked but five days out of seven, are we to believe the stories told by lying economists, that they lived on nothing but air and fresh water? Not so, they had leisure to taste the joys of earth, to make love and to frolic, to banquet joyously in honor of the jovial god of idleness. Gloomy England, immersed in protestantism, was then called "Merrie Eng- * Under the old regrime, the lawa of the church guar- anteed the laborer ninety rest days, flfty-two Sundays and thirty-eight holidays, during which he was strict- ly forbidden to work. This was the great crime of Catholicism, the principal cause of the Irréligion of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie: under the revolution, when once it was in the saddle, it abo- lished the holidays and replaced the week of seven days by that of ten, in order that the people might no longer have more than one rest day out of the ten. It emancipated the laborers from the yoke of the church in order the better to subjugate them un- der the yoke of work. The hatred against the holidays does not appear until the modern industrial and commercial bour- geoisie takes definite form, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Henry IV asked of the pope that they be reduced. He refused because "one of the cur- rent heresies of the day is regarding feasts" (Letters of Cardinal d'Ossat). But in 1666 Perefixus, archbishop of Paris, suppressed seventeen of them in his diocese. Protestantism, which was the Christian religion adapt- ed to the new Industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less solicitous for the people's rest. It dethroned the saints In heaven in order to abolish their feast days on earth. ' Religious reform and philosophical free thought were but pretexts which permitted the Jesuitical and rapacious bourgeoisie to pilfer the feast days of the people. y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 33 and." Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes, and the unknown authors of the romances ^ make our mouths water with their pictures of those monumental feasts* with which the men of that time regaled themselves between two battles and two devastations, in which everything "went by the barrel'*. Jordaens and the Flemish School have told the story. of these feasts in their de- lightful pictures. Where, O, where, are the sublime gargantuan stomachs of those days; where are the sublime brains encircling all human thought? We have indeed grown puny and de- generate. Embalmed beef, potatoes, doctored wine and Prussian schnaps, judiciously com- bined with compulsory labor have weakened our bodies and narrowed our minds. And the times when man cramps his stomach and the machine enlarges its out-put are the very times when the economists preach to us the Malthusian theory, • These grigrantic feasts lasted for weeks. Don Ro- drigro de Lara wins h^s bride by expeUing the Moors from old Calatrava, and the Romancero relates th« story: Les bodas fueron en Burgos Las tornabodas en Salas: En bodas y tornabodas Pasaron siete semanas Tantas vienen de las rentes Que no caben por las plazas (The weddingr was at Bourges, the infaringr at Salas. In the wedding an^ the infaring seven weeks were spent. So many people came that the town could not hold them ). ^ , The men of these seven-weeks weddings were the herofe soldiers of the wars of independence. y Google 84 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY the religion of abstinence and the dogma of work. Really it would be better to pluck out such tongues and throw them to the dogs. Because the working class, with its simple good faith, has allowed itself to be thus indoc- trinated, because with its native impetuosity it has blindly hurled itself into work and abstin- ence, the capitalist class has found itself con- demned to laziness and forced enjoyment, to unproductiveness and overconsumption. But if the over-work of the laborer bruises his flesh and tortures his nerves, it is also fertile in griefs for the capitalist. The abstinence to which the productive class condemns itself obliges the capitalists to devote themselves to the over-consumption of the pro- ducts turned out so riotously by the laborers. At the beginning of capitalist production a cent- ury or two ago, the capitalist was a steady man of reasonable and peaceable habits. He con- tented himself with one wife or thereabouts. He drank only when he was thirsty and ate only when he was hungry. He left to the lords and ladies of the court the noble virtues of debauch- ery. Today every son of the newly rich makes it incumbent upon himself to cultivate the dise- ase for which quicksilver is a specific in order to justify the labors imposed upon the workmen Digitized by VjOOQIC THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 86 in quicksilver mines ; every capitalist crams him- self with capons stuffed with truffles and with the choicest brands of 'nine in order to encour- age the breeders of blooded poultry and the growers of Bordelais. In this occupation the organism rapidly becomes shattered, the hair falls out, the gums shrink away from the teeth, the body becomes deformed, the stomach ob- trudes abnormally, respiration becomes difficult, the motions become labored, the joints become stiff, the fingers knotted. Others, too feeble in body to ^ndure the fatigues of debauchery, but endowed with the biunp of philanthropic dis- crimination, dry up their brains over political economy, or juridical philosophy in elaborating thick soporific books to employ the leisure hours of compositors and pressmen. The women of fashion live a life of martyrdom, in trying on and showing off the fairy-like toilets which the seamstresses die in making. They shift like shut- tles from morning until night from one gown into another. For hours together they give up their hollow heads to the artists in hair> who at any cost insist on assuaging their passion for the construction of false chignons. Bound in their corsets, pinched in their boots, décollette to make a coal-miner blush, they whirl around the whole night through at their charity balls in Digitized by VjOOQIC 86 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY order to pick up a few cents for poor people,— sanctified souls! To fulfill his double social function of non- producer and over-consumer, the capitalist was not only obliged to violate his modest taste, to lose his laborious habits of two centuries ago and to give himself up to unbounded luxury, spicy indigestibles and syphilitic debauches, but also to withdraw from productive labor an enormous mass of men in order to enlist them as his as- sistants. Here are a few figures to prove how colossal is this waste of productive forces. According ,to the census of 1861, the population of Eng- land and Wales comprised 20,066,244 persons, 9,776,259 male and 10,289,965 female. If we deduct those too old or too young to work, the unproductive women, boys and girls, then the "ideological professions", such as governors, policemen, clergy, magistrates, soldiers, prosti- tutes, artists, scientists, etc.^ next the people exclusively occupied with eating the labor of others under the form of land-rent, interest, dividends, etc there remains a total of eight million individuals of both sexes and of every age, including the capitalists who function in production, commerce, finance, etc. Out of these eight millions the figures run: Digitized by VjOOQIC THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 37 Agricultural laborers, including herdsmen, serv- ants and farmers' daughters living at home 1,098,261 Factory Workers in cotton, wool, hemp, linen silk, knitting 642,607 Mine Workers 565,835 Metal Workers (blast furnaces, rolling mills, etc.) 396,998 Domestics 1,208,648 "If we add together the textile workers and the miners, we obtain the figures of 1,208442; if to the former we add the metal workers, we have a total of 1,039,605 persons; that is to say, in^each case a number below that of the modern domestic slaves. Behold the magnificent result of the capitalist exploitation of machines."* To this class of domestics, the size of which indicates the stage attained by capitalist civiliza- tion, must still be added the enormous class of unfortunates devoted exclusively to satisfying the vain and expensive tastes of the rich clas- ses: diamond cutters, lace-makers, embroider- ers, binders of luxurious books, seamstresses em- ployed on expensive gowns decorators of villas, etc.t • Karl Marx»s "Capital". + "The proportion in which the population of the country Is employed as domestics in the service of the wealthy class Indicates its progress in national wealth y Google 38 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY Once settled down înto absolute laziness and demoralized by enforced enjoyment, the capital- ist class in spite of the injury involved in its new kind of life, adapted itself to it. Soon it began to look upon any change with horror. The sight of the miserable conditions of life resign- edly accepted by the working class and the sight of the organic degradation engendered by the depraved passion for work increased its aversion for all compulsory labor and all restrictions of its pleasures. It is precisely at that time that, without taking into account the demoralization which the capitalist class had imposed 'upon it- self as a social dyty, the proletarians took it into their heads to inflict work on the capital- ists Artless as they were, they took seriously the theories of work proclaimed by the econom- ists and moralists, and girded up their loins to inflict the practice of these theories upon the capitalists. The proletariat hoisted the banner, "He who will not work Neither shall he Eat'*. Lyons in 183 1 rose up for bullets or work. The federated laborers of March 187 1 called their and civilization." (R. M. Martin, "Ireland Before and After the Union/* 1818). Qambetta, who has denied that there was a social question ever since he ceased to be the poverty stricken lawyer of the Café Procope, undoubtedly alluded to this ever-increasingr domestic class when he announced the advent of new social strata. y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 89 Uprising ^The Revolution of Work". To these outbreaks of barbarous fury destructive of all capitalist joy and laziness, the capitalists had no other answer than ferocious repression, but they know that if they have been able to repress these revolutionary explosions, they have not drowned in the blood of these gigantic massacres the ab- surd idea of the proletariat wishing to inflict work upon the idle and reputable classes, and it is to avert this misfortune that they surround themselves with guards, policemen, magistrates and jailors, supported in laborious unprodutive- ness. There is no more room for illusion as to the function of modern armies. They are perm- anently maintained only to suppress the "enemy within''. Thus the forts of Paris and Lyons have not been built to defend the city against the foreigner, but to crush it in case of revolt. And if an unanswerable example be called for, we mention the army of Belgium, that paradise of capitalism. Its neutrality is guaranteed by the European powers, and nevertheless its army is one of the strongest in proportion to its popula- tion. The grlorious battlefields of the brave Belg- ian army are the plains of the Borinage and of Charleroi. It is in the blood of the unarmed miners and laborers that the Belgian officers temper their swords and win their epaulets. The y Google 40 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY nations of Europe have not national armies but mercenary armies. They protect the capitalists against the popular fury which would condemn them to ten hours of mining or spinning. Again, while compressing its own stomach the working class has developed abnormally the stomach of the capitalist class, condemned to over-consump- tion. For alleviation of its painful labor the capi- talist class has withdrawn from the working class a mass of men far superior to those still devoted to useful production and has condemned them in their turn to unproductiveness and over-con- sumption. But this troop of useless mouths in spite of its insatiable voracity, does not suffice to consume all the goods which the laborers, brutalized by the dogtna of work, produce like madmen, without wishing to consume them and without even thinking whether people will be found to consume them. Confronted with this double madness of the laborers killing themselves with over-produc- tion and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs. Since the European laborers, shivering with cold and y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 41 hunger, refuse to wear the stuffs they weave, to drink the wines from the vineyards they tend, the poor manufacturers in their goodness of heart must run to the ends of the earth to find people to wear the clothes and drink the wines : Europe exports every year goods amounting to billions of dollars to the four corners of the earth, to nations that have no need of them* But the explored continents are no longer vast enough. Virgin countries are needed. European manufacturers dream night and day of Africa, of a lake in the Saharan desert, of a railroad to the Soudan. They anxiously follow the prog- ress of Livingston, Stanley, Du Chaillu ; they listen open-mouthed to the marvelous tales of these brave travelers. Wihat unknown wonders are contained in the "dark continent''! Fields are sown witl\ elephants' teeth, rivers of cocoa- nut oil are dotted with gold, millions of backsides, as bare as the faces of Dufaure and Girardin, are awaiting cotton goods to teach them dec- * Two examples: The Engrlish government to satisfy the peasants of India, who in spite of the periodical famines desolating their country insist on cultivating poppies instead of rice or wheat, has been obliged to undertake bloody wars in order to impose upon the Chinese Government the free entry of Indian opium. The savages of Polynesia, in spite of the mortality resulting from it are obliged to clothe themselves in the English fashion in order to consume the prod- ucts of the Scotch distilleries and the Manchester cot- ton miU8> y Google 42 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY ency, and bottles of schnaps and bibles from which they may learn the virtues of civilization. But all to no purpose : the over- fed capitalist, the servant class greater in numbers than the productive class, the foreign and barbarous na- tions, gorged with European goods; nothing, nothing can melt away the mountains of products heaped up higher and more enormous than the pyramids of Egypt. The productiveness of European laborers defies all consumption, all waste. The manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to turn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the law- less depraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same durability as the promises made to voters. At Lyons, instead of leaving the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and supp- leness, it is loaded down with mineral salts, which while increasing its weight, make it friable and far from durable. All our products are adulter- ated to aid in their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the "Age of adultera- tion" just as the first epochs of humanity re- ceived the names of "The Age of Stone", "The y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 49 Age of Bronze'*, from the character of their production. Certain ignorant people accuse our pious manufacturers of fraud, while in reality the thought which animates them is to furnish work to their laborers, who cannot resign them- selves to living with their arms folded. These adulterations, whose sole motive is a humanitar- ian sentiment, but which bring splendid profits to the manufacturers who practice them, if they are disastrous for the quality of the goods, if they are an inexhaustible source of waste in human labor, nevertheless prove the ingenuous philanthropy of the capitalists, and the horrible perversion of the laborers, who to gratify their vice for work oblige the manufacturers to stifle the cries of their conscience and to violate even the laws of commercial honesty. And nevertheless, in spite of the overproduc- tion of goods, in spite of the adulterations in manufacturing, the laborers encumber the market in countless numbers imploring: Work! Work! Their superabundance ought to compel them to bridle their passion; on the contrary it carries it to the point of paroxysm. Let a chance for work present itself, thither they rush; then they demand twelve, fourteen hours to glut their appetite for work, and the next day they are again thrown out on the pavement with no more y Google • 44 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY food for their vice. Every year in all industries lockouts occur with the regularity of the sea- sons. Over-work, destructive of the organism, is succeeded by absolute rest during two or fçur months, and when work ceases the pittance cea- ses. Since the vice of work is diabolically at- tached to the heart of the laborers, since its requirements stifle all the other instincts of na- ture, since the quantity of work required by society is necessarily limited by consumption and by the supply of raw materials, why devour in six months the work of a whole year; why not distribute it uniformly over the twelve months and force every workingman to content himself with six or five hours a day throughout the year instead of getting indigestion from twelve hours during six months ? Once assured of their daily portion of work, the laborers will no longer be jealous of each other, no longer fight to snatch away work from each other's hands and bread from each other's mouths, and then, not ex- hausted in body and mind, they will begin to practice the virtues of laziness. Brutalized by their vice, the laborers have been unable to rise to the conception of this fact, that to have work for all it is necessary to appor- tion it like water on a ship in distress. Mean- while certain manufacturers in the name of cap- y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 45 italist exploitation have for a long time de- manded a legal limitation of the work day. Be- fore the commission of i860 on professional edu- cation, one of the greatest manufacturers of Alsace, M. Bourcart of Gueb wilier, declared: "The day of twelve hours is excessive and ought to be reduced to eleven, while work ought ta be stopped at two o'clock on Saturday. I advise the adoption of this measure, although it may appear onerous at first sight. We have tried it in our industrial establishments for four years and find ourselves the better for it, while the average production, far from having diminished, has increased." In his sttidy of machines M. F. Passy quotes, the following letter from a great Belgian manufacturer M. Ottevaere: ^*Our ma- chines, although the same as those of the English spinning mills, do not produce what they ought to produce or what those same machines would produce in England, although the spinners there work two hours a day less. We all work two good hours too much. I am convinced that if we worked only eleven hours instead of thirteen we should have the same product and we should consequently produce more ecconomically." Again, M. Leroy Beaulieu affirms that it is a remark of a great Belgian manufacturer that the Digitized by VjOOQIC 46 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY . weeks in which a holiday falls result in a prod- uct not less than ordinary weeks.* An aristocratic government has dared to do what a people, duped in their simplicity by the moralists, never dared. Despising the lofty and moral industrial considerations of the economists, who like the birds of ill omen, croaked that to reduce by one hour the work in factories was to decree the ruin of English industry, the govern- ment of England has forbidden by a law strictly enforced to work more than ten hours a day, and as before England remains the first industrial nation of the world, f The experiment tried on so great a scale is on record ; the experience of certain intelligent cap- italists is on record. They prove beyond a doubt that to strengthen human production it is neces- sary to reduce the hours of labor and multiply the pay days and feast days, yet the French na- tion is not convinced. But if the miserable re- duction of two hours has increased English pro- duction by almost one-third in ten years, what breathless speed would be given to French pro- * Paul Leroy-Beaulieu. La Question Ouvrière au XIX siècle, 1872. t It should be observed that this was written In 1888, since which time the United States has taken the first rank. The soundness of Lafar^ue's reasonlnsr is confirmed by the fact that In this country the hours of labor in the most important industries are even less than in England. (Translator.) y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 47 duction by a legal limitation of the working day to three hours. Cannot the laborers understand that by over-working themselves they exhaust their own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up and long before their time conie to be incapable of any work at all, that ab- sorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are no longer men but pieces of men, that they kill within themselves all beautiful faculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious madness for work. Like Arcadian parrots, they repeat the lesson of the economist : "Let us work, let us work to increase the national wealth/ O, idiots, it is because you work too much that the industrial equipment develops slowly. Stop bray- ing and listen to an economist, no other than M. L. Reybaud, whom we were fortunate enough to lose a few months ago. "It is in general by the conditions of hand-work that the revolution in methods of labor is regulated. As long as hand- work furnishes its services at a low price, it is lavished, while efforts are made to economize it when its services become more costly." * To force the Capitalists to improve their ma- chines of wood and iron it is necessary to raise wages and diminish the working hours of the * Louis Reybaud. JLe coton, son regime, ses pro- blêmes (1863). y Google 48 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY machines of flesh and blood. Do you ask for proofs ? They can be furnished by the hundreds. In spinning, the self-acting mule was invented and applied at Manchester because the spinners refused to work such long hours as before. In America the machine is invading all branches of farm production, from the making of butter to the weeding of wheat. Why, because the Ame- rican, free and lazy, would prefer a thousand deaths to the bovine life of the French peasant. Plowing, so painful and and so crippling to the laborer in our glorious France, is in the Ameri- can West an agreeable open-air pastime, which he practices in a sitting posture, smoking his pipe nonchalantly. IV. NEW SONGS TO NEW MUSIC. We have seen that by diminishing the hours of labor new mechanical forces will be conquered for social production. Furthermore, by obliging the laborers to consume their products the army of workers will be immensely increased. The cap- italist class once relieved from its function of uni- versal consumer will hasten to dismiss its train of soldiers, magistrates, journalists, procurers, which it has withdrawn from useful labor to help y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 49 it in consuming and wasting. Then the labor market will overflow. Then will be required an iron law to put a limit on work. It will be im- possible to find employment for that swarm of former unproductives, more numerous than in- sect parasites, and after them must be considered all those who provide for their needs and their vain and expensive tastes. When there are no more lackeys and generals to decorate, no more free and married prostitutes to be covered with laces, no more cannons to bore, no more palaces to build, there will be need of severe laws to com- pel the working women and workingmen who have been employed on embroidered laces, iron workings, buildings, to take the hygienic and calisthenic exercises requisite to re-establish their health and improve their race. When once we begin to consume European prodttcts at home instead of sending them to the devil, it will be necessary that the sailors, dock handlers and the draymen sit down and learn to twirl their thumbs. The happy Polynesians may then love as they like without fearing the civilized Venus and the sermons of European moralists. And that is not all : In order to find work for all the non-producers of our present society, in order to leave room for the industrial equipment to go on developing indefinitely, the working y Google 60 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY class will be compelled, like the capitalist clajjs, to do violence to its taste for abstinence and to develop indefinitely its consuming capacuies. Instead of eating an ounce or two of gristly meat once a day, when it eats any, it will eat juicy beefsteaks of a pound or two ; instead of drinking moderately of bad wine, it will become more orthodox than the pope and will drink broad and deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgundy with- out commercial baptism and will leave water to the beasts. The proletarians have taken into their heads to inflict upon the capitalists ten hours of forge and factory ; that is their great mistake, because of social antagonisms and civil wars. Work ought to be forbidden and not imposed. The Rothschilds and other capitalists should be al- lowed to bring testimony to the fact that through- out their whole lives they have been perfect vag- abonds, and if they swear they wish to continue to live as perfect vagabonds in spite of the gen- eral mania for work, they should be pensioned and should receive every morning at the city hall a five-dollar gold piece for their pocket money. Social discords will vanish. Bond holders and capitalists will be first to rally to the popular party, once convinced that far from wishing them harm, its purpose is rather to relieve them of y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 51 the labor of over-consumption and waste, with which they have been overwhelmed since their birth. As for the capitalists who are incapable of proving their title to the name of vagabond, they will be allowed to follow their instincts. There are plenty of disgusting occupations in which to place them. Dufaure might be set at cleaning public closets, Gallifet* might perform surgical operations on diseased horses and hogs. The members of the amnesty commission might be sent to the stock yards to pick out the oxen and the sheep to be slaughtered. The senators might play the part of undertakers and lackeys in funeral processions. As for the others, occtr- pations could be found for them on a level with their intelligence. Lorgeril and Broglie could cork champagne bottles, only they would have to be muzzled as a precaution against intoxica- tion. Ferry, Freycinet and Tirard might destroy the bugs and vermin in the departments of state and other public houses. It would, however, be necessary to put the public funds out of the reach of the capitalists out of due regard for their ac- quired habits. But vengeance, harf^h and prolonged, will be • GaUifet wa.» the ?e»eral who was directly respon- sible for ♦be lûiF^re^f^. *>' «^ h or sard 3 of French wark- injrmen fJ th-» ^îjQUing day« of the Paris Commune. y Google 62 THE RIGHT TO ^E LAZY heaped upon the moralists who have perverted nature, the bigots, the canters, the hypocrites, "and other such sects of men who disguise them- . selves like maskers to deceive the world. For whilst they give the common people to under- stand that they are busied abbut nothing but con- templation and devotion in fastings and macera- tion of their sensuality, — and that only to sus- tain and aliment the small fraility of their hu- manity, — it is so far otherwise that on the con- trary, God knows, what cheer they make; et Curios simulant, sed Bacchanalia vivuntJ^ You may read it in great letters, in the coloring of their red snouts, and gulching bellies as big as a tun, unless it be when they perfume themselves with sulphur."t On the days of great popular rejoicing, when instead of swallowing dust as on the 15th of August and 14th of July under cap- italism, the communists and coUectivists will eat, drink and dance to their hearts' content, the members of the Academy, of moral and political sciences, the priests with long robes and short, of the economic, catholic, protestant, Jewish, posi- tivist and free-thought church ; the propagandists of Malthusianism, and of Christian, altruistic, independent or dependent ethics, clothed in yel- • They simulate Curius but live like Bacchanals. (Juvenal.) t Rabelais 'Tantagrruel/' Book II, Chapter XXXIV, Translation of Urquhart and Motteux. Digitized by VjOOQIC THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 53 low, shall be compelled to hold a candle until it bums their fingers, shall starve in sight of tables loaded with meats, fruits and flowers and shall agonize with thirst in sight of flowing hogsheads. Four times a year with the changing seasons they shall be shut up like the knife grinders' dogs in great wheels and condemned to grind wind for ten hours. The lawyers and legislators shall suffer the same punishment. Under the regime of idleness, to kill the time, which kills us second by second, there will be shows and theatrical performances always and always. And here we have the Very work for our bourgeois legislators. We shall or- ganize them into traveling companies to go to the fairs and villages, giving legislative exhibi- tions. The generals in riding boots, their breasts brilliantly decorated with medals and crosses, shall go through the streets and courts levying recruits among the good people. Gambetta and his comrade Cassag^ac shall tend door. Cas- sagnac, inlFuU duelist costume, rolling his eyes and twisting his mustache, spitting out burning tow, shall threaten every one with his father's pistol* and sink into a hole as soon as they show * Paul de Cassaffnac, like his father, Granier, was prominent as a conservative politician, Journalist and duelist. y Google 54 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY him LulHer's portrait. Gambetta will discourse on foreign politics and on little Greece, who makes a doctor of him and would set Europe on fire to pilfer Turkey ; on great Russia that stulti- fies him with the mincemeat she promises to mak^ of Prussia and who would fain see mischief brew, ing in the west of Europe so as to feather her nest in the east and to strangle nihilism at home ; on Mr, Bismark who was good enough to allow him to pronounce himself on the amnesty then uncovering his mountainous belly smeared over with red and white and blue, the three na- tional colors, he will beat the tattoo on it, and enumerate the delicate little ortolans, the truffles and the glasses of Margaux and Y'quem that it has gulped down to encourage agriculture, and to keep his electors of Belleville in good spirits. In the barracks the entertainment will open with the "Electoral Farce." In the presence of the voters with wooden heads and asses' ears, the bourgeois candidates, dressed as clowns, will dance the dance of poli- tical liberties, wiping themselves fore and aft with their freely promising electoral programs, and talking with tears in their eyes of the mis- eries of the people and with copper in their voices of thç glories of France. Then the heads of the voters will bray solidly in chorus, hi han 1 hi han ! y Google THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 55 Then will start the great play, "The Theft of the Nation's Goods." Capitalist France, an enormous female, hairy- faced and bald-headed, fat, flabby, puffy and pale, with sunken eyes, sleepy and yawning, is stretch- ing herself out on a velvet couch. At her feet Industrial Capitalism, a gigantic organism of iron, with an ape-like mask, is mechanically de- vouring men, women and children, whose thrill- ing and heart-rending cries fill the air ; the bank with a marten's muzzle, a hyena's body and harpy — ^hands, is nimbly flipping coins out of his pocket. Hordes of miserable, emaciated prole- ' tarians in rags, escorted by gendarmes with drawn sabers, pursued by furies lashing them with whips of hunger, are bringing to the feet of capitalist France heaps of merchandise, casks of wine, sacks of gold and wheat. Langlois, his nether garment in one hand, the testament of Proudhon in the other and the b(X)k of the na- tional budget between his teeth, is encamped at the head of the defenders of national property and is mounting guard. When the laborers, beaten with gun stocks and pricked with bayo- . nets, have laid down their burdens, they are driven away and the door is opened to the man- ufacturers, merchants and bankers. They hurl themselves pell mell upon the heap, devouring y Google 66 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY cotton goods, sacks of wheat, ingots of gold, emptying casks of wine. When they have de- voured all they can, they sink down, filthy and disgusting objects in their ordure and vomitings. Then the thunder bursts forth, the earth shakes and opens, Historic Destiny arises, with her iron foot she crushes the beads of the capitalists, hic- coughing, staggering, falling, unable to flee. With her broad hand she overthrows capitalist France, astounded and sweating with fear. If, uprooting from its heart the vice which dominates it and degrades its nature, the work- ing class were to arise in its terrible strength, not to demand the Rights of Man, which are but the^ rights of capitalist exploitation, not to de- mand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her. But how should we ask a proletariat corrupted by capital- ist ethics, to take a manly resolution.... Like Christ, the doleful personification of an- cient slavery, the men, the women and the chil- dren of the proletariat have been climbing pain- fully for a century up the hard Calvai'y of pain ; Digitized by VjOOQIC THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 57 for a century compulsory toil has broken their bones, bruised their flesh, tortured their nerves; for a century hunger has torn their entrails and their brains. O Laziness, have pity on our long misery ! O Laziness, mother of the arts and no- ble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish ! APPENDIX Our moralists are very modest people. If they invented the dogma of work, they still have doubts of its efficacy in tranquilizing the soul, rejoicing the spirit, and maintaining the proper functioning of the entrails and other organs. They wish to try its workings on the populace, in anima vili, before turning it against the cap- italists, to excuse and authorize whose vices is their peculiar mission. But, you, three-for-a-cent philosophers, why thus cudgel your brains to work out an ethics the practice of which you dare not counsel to your masters? Your dogma of work, of which you are so proud, do you wish to see it scoffed at, dishonored? Let us open the history of an- cient peoples and the writings of their philoso- phers and law givers. '^I could not affirm," says the father of history, Herodotus, "whether the Greeks derived from the Egyptians the contempt y Google 58 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY which they have for work, because I find the same contempt established among the Thracians, the Cythians, the Persians, the Lydians; in a word, because among most barbarians, those who learn mechanical arts and even their children are regarded as the meanest of their citizens. All the Greeks have been nurtured in this principle, particularly the Lacedaemonians." * "At Athens the citizens were veritable nobles who had to concern themselves but with the de- fense and the administration of the community, like the savage warriors from whom they de- scended. Since they must thus have all their time free to watch over the interests of the republic, with their mental and bodily-strength, they laid all labor upon the slaves. Likewise at Lacedae- mon, even the women were not allowed to spin or weave that they might not detract from their nobility." t The Romans recognized but two noble and free professions, agriculture and arms. All the citizens by right lived at the expense of the treas- ury without being constrained to provide for theii living by any of the sordid arts (thus, they de^ sigïiated the trades), which rightfully belonged • Herodotus, Book II. t Biot. De L'abolition de L'esclavafire ancien en reached Digitized by VjOOQIC THE WOMAN QUESTION 116 the emancipation of woman.* The philosophers and the moralists had the simplicity to believe that they would stop the woman movement by opposing to it the sacred interest of the family, which they declared could not survive without the subjection of woman to the labors of the Jhousehold, the sewing on of shirt buttons, the mending of hose, etc., her duty was to devote herself to these obscure and thankless labors, in order that man might freely unfold and display his brilliant and superior faculties. These same philosophers, who lectured the rebellious ladies on the cult of the family, sang the praises of capitalist industry, which, by forcing the wife away from the domestic hearth and her child's cradle to condemn her to the forced labor of the factory, destroys the working-class family. The bourgeois ladies laughed at the sermons, equally imbecile and ethical, of these solemn phi- losophers; they kept on their way and attained the end they set for themselves; like the patri- cian lady of ancient Rome and the countess of the eighteenth century, they threw off the cares of housekeeping and of the nursing of the child ♦ The Saint Simon manifesto of 1830 announced that -the religion of Saint Simon had come "to put an end to that shameful traffic, that legal prostitution, which under the name of marriage often blesses the mon- strous union of self -surrender and egoism, of light and of ignorance, of youth and decrepitude." ^ y Google 116 THE WOMAN QUESTION Upon mercenaries, that they might devote them- selves wholly to the toilet, that they might be the most luxuriously arrayed dolls in the capital- ist world and in order to make business move. The daughters and wives of American plutocracy have attained the extreme limits of this sort of emancipation ; they are transforming their fathers and husbands into accumulators of millions, which they squander madly. Since the toilet does not exhaust the entire activity of the ladies of capitalism, they find amusement in breaking the marriage contract in order to assert their inde- pendence and improve the race. The Communist Manifesto remarks that the innumerable divorce suits in which adultery is alleged are indisputa- ble proofs of the respect inspired in the bourgeois of both sexes by the sacred bonds of marriage which the "licentious socialists" talk of loosen- ing. When the daughters and wives of the small bourgeoisie, obliged to earn their living and to increase the resources of the family, began to invade the stores, the pffices, the civil service and the liberal professions, the bourgeois were seized with anxiety for their means of existence already so reduced; feminine competition would reduce them still further. The intellectuals who took up the defense of the males, thought it prudent Digitized by VjOOQIC THE WOMAN QUESTION 117 not to Start afresh with the ethical sermons which had miscarried so piteously in the case of the wealthy bourgeois ladies; — ^they appealed to sci- ence; they demonstrated by reasons which were irrefutable and loftily scientific that woman can- not emerge from the occupations of housekeep- ing without violating the laws of nature and his- tory. They proved to their complete satisfaction that woman is an inferior being, incapable of re- ceiving a higher intellectual education and of furnishing the combination of attention, energy and agility demanded by the professions in which she was entering into competition with man. Her brain, less voluminous, less heavy and less com- plex than that of man, is a "child's brain." Her less developed muscles have not the strength for attack and for resistance ; the bones of her fore- arm, her pelvis, her femur, and in fact all her osseous, muscular and nervous system do not permit her to undertake more than the routine of the household. Nature designed her in all her organization to be the servant of man, just as the odious god of the Jews and Christians marked out the race of Ham for slavery. History contributed its startling confirmation of these ultra scientific truths; the philosophers and the historians affirmed that always and everywhere the wife, subordinate to the man, had y Google 118 THE WOMAN QUESTION been shut up in the house, in the woman's apart- ments; if such had been her lot in the past, such was to be her destiny in the future, was the positive declaration of Auguste Comte, the profoundest of bourgeois phil- osophers. Lombroso, the illustrious comedian, went him one better: he seriously declared that social statistics proclaimed the inferiority of woman, since the number of female criminals is below that of male criminals; while buried in these figures, he might have added that the sta- tistics of insanity demonstrate the same inferior- ity. Thus we see that ethics, anatomy, physiol- ogy, social statistics and history riveted forever upon woman the chains of domestic servitiKie.. II. Bachofen, Morgan and a crowd of anthropolog- ists have revised the opinion of the historians and philosophers upon the role played by woman in the past. They have shown that everywhere the paternal family, which subordinated woman to man, had been preceded by the maternal family, which gave the first place to woman. The Greek language contains the record of her two condi- tions: while the Spartans, among whom matri- archal customs persisted, still continued to call her despoifiQ, the mistress of the house, the sov- y Google THE WOMAN QUESTION 119 ereign, the other Greeks gave to the wife the name damar, the subdued, the vanquished. The Odyssey, in characterizing Nausicaa, says that she is parthenos admes, the girl not subdued, that is to say, without a husband, without a master. The modern expression ^'yoke of marriage" pre- serves the ancient idea. Hesiod, in opposition to Homer, who tells only of patriarchal customs, preserves precious recol- lections of the matriarchal family; he tells us that when it existed man, even if he were a hun- dred years old, lived with his prudent mother, — he was fed in her house like a great child. (Works and Days, V. 129-130.) It was not the woman who then had the "child's brain," but the man ; everything seems in fact to prove that her intelligence was the first to develop. This intel- lectual superiority caused her to be deified before man in the primitive religions of Egypt, the In- dies, Asia and Greece, and caused the first inven- tions of the arts and trades, with the exception of metal working, to be attributed to goddesses and not to gods. The Muses, originally three in number, were in Greece, even in preference to Apollo, the goddesses of poetry, music and the dance. Isis, "mother of corn ears and lady of bread," and Demeter, lawgiver, had taught the Egyptians and Greeks the tillage of barley and y Google 120 THE WOMAN QUESTION wheat and made them renounce their anthropo- phagie repasts. The woman appeared to the pre- patriarchal man, like the Germans whom Taci- tus knew, as having within herself something holy and providential, aliquid sanctum et provi- dum (Germania VIII). Her prudence and fore- sight gave her this divine character. Must we conclude that this intellectual superiority, . which manifested itself when the economic environment is rudimentary, is a natural phenomenon? But, in any case, it may be asserted that the vitality of woman is superior to that of man. The life insurance companies of the United States, England and Holland, which do not base their calculation upon scientific fairy tales of the in- tellectuals but upon mortality tables, pay woman an annuity below that which they give man, be- cause her probabilities of death are less. Here for example is the annuity paid for a capital of $1,000 by American' and Dutch companies ':^ New York. Hojland. Age. Men. Women. Men. Women. so years | 76.47 % 69.57 $ 76-80 $ 73.60 60 years 97.34 88.03 98.50 93.S0 70 years 134.31 122.48 142.00 136.70 80 years 183.95 168.00 222.70 211.70 ♦ The French companies make no differences be- tween the sexes because they pay very small annui- ties. La Générale, the most Important one in France, fives for $1.000 at the age of 50 years an a^nnuity of 64.20; at 60 years $80.80; at 70 years $118.50; at- 80 years $134.70. Thus It realizes immense profits; its shares which in 1819 were worth 750 francs each were quoted last January at 31,300 francs.'" y Google THE WOMAN QUESTION 121 It may be objected that man, leading a more active life, is more subject to accidents, diseases, and other causes of death, and that consequently the prolonged life of woman does not prove the higher vitality of her organism, but the advant- ages of a life less subject to accident. The answer to this objection is found in the statistics of the various nations. There is in no country a perfect equilibrium between the num- ber of women and that of men; for i,ooo men there are in Belgium 1,005 women, in France 1,014, in England 1,062, in Scotland 1,071 and in Norway 1,091. Nevertheless in these coun- tries with the feminine preponderance there is an excess of masculine births: of the whole of Western Europe for every 1000 girls there are born from 1,040 to 1,060 boys. If, in spite of this excess of masculine births, more girls survive, it is because the greater mortality of the boys shows the balance in favor of the girls ; and this higher mortality cannot be explained by the life of man being more subject to accident, since it is ob- served at an early age, notably during the first two years. All the diseases of childhood, with the exception of diphtheria and whooping cough, are to a perceptible extent more fatal among boys than among girls; from zero to five years the male sex is particularly frail; at all age^, except y Google 122 THE WOMAN QUESTION between ten and fifteen years, the male mortality is in excess of the female. The superior vitality of the female sex is ^Iso noticeable in the greater ease with which it builds up its organism. M. Iribe, superintendent of the sanitarium of Hendaye, to which are sent Paris- ian children from three to fourteen years of age, who are afflicted with anaemia, incipient tuber- culosis, scrofula and rickets, reports that at the time of their dismissal, at the end of six months, the progress in weight, girth and chest develop- ment is incomparably higher in the girls than in the boys, the increase in weight is double and often more. The same statement has been made by other superintendents of sanitariums. (Bulletin Med- ical, No. 8i, 1903.) Woman undeniably possesses a greater vitality than man. M. Gustav Loisel has made inquiry **as to whether this difference existed in embry- onic life, and what may be its cause?" He has communicated the results of his inquiries to the Biological Society of Paris, which published them in its Bulletin of November 6, 1903. M. Loisel availed himself of 792 weights and measurements made upon ^2 foetuses at the y Google THE WOMAN QUESTION 123 Maternity Hospital of Paris by C. E. Legou;* from the following weights of the foetuses at three, four, five and six months he obtains the following figures : Males. Females. Differences. Grammes. Grammes. Total weight ...1908.18 1708.11 200.07 in favor of males Kidneys 16.87 i7«i9 2.67 in favor of males Superrenal glands 5.15 6.43 0.32 in favor of females Liver 88.35 96.31 1.28 in favor of females Spleen 2.59 2.38 7.90 in favor of females Thymus 3.89 3.97 0.21 in favor of males Heart -. — .. 10.97 12.60 0.08 in favor of females Lungs 47.29 44.62 1.63 in favor of females Brain 236.94 235.17 1.17 in favor of males 'These figures thus show us," says M. Loisel, "a preponderance already existing in favor of the females as regards the kidneys, the superrenal glands, the liver, the thymus and the heart ; this predominance is the more noticeable since the total weight of the body is larger in the male than in the female." If now we take the relation between the total weight and the weight of the organs which are heaviest in the male, we find that the proportion is still in favor of the female : PROPORTION OF TOTAL WEIGHT. Males. Females. Spleen 1 to 736 1 to 718 Lungs 1 to 40 1 to 38 Brain 1 to 8 1 to 7 ♦ E. Legou. "Some Considerations on the Develop- ment of the Foetus." Paris. 1903. The weights and measurements of M. Legou were made for official use. y Google 124 THE WOMAN QUESTION The organs here examined, brain included, are thus absolutely or relatively heavier in the female foetus than in the male foetus. M. Loisel has also examined into the propor- tion of the weights of the different organs to the total weight according to the age of the foetus. He has prepared a table, from which I take only the figures concerning the brain : Proportion of AGE TOTAL WEIGHT weight of brain to total weight. ^ Males Females Males Females Grammes Grammes I I 3 Months 58.33 65.96 6.5 '/ I I 4 Months 167.25 182.58 — 7.3 6.6 z I 5 Months 336.33 295.00 — 7.6 7.5 I I 6 Months 732.58 636.00 8:3 7.3 The weight of the male foetus, which is below that of the female foetus, at three months, when . the sex has just been determined, grows more rapidly and the proportion between the weight is always to the advantage of the females from the fourth month on. "To sum up," says M. Loisel, ^'all the organs are heavier in the female foetus than in the male foetus up to about the fourth month. The pre- dominance then passes over to the male, but only y Google THE WOMAN QUESTION 125 for the lungs apd the organs for sex-union, thus the cardiac muscle always remains heavier in the female. The organs which are of real service to the individual during the embryonic life always remain more developed in the female sex. "If now we consider that the differences in favor of the females are especially in the liver, the heart, the superrenal glands and the kidneys, we shall come to the conclusion that the greater vitality of the female organisms corresponds to their being better nourished and better purified."* III. The superior organization possessed by woman at birth, assuring her throughout her life a much greater vitality, is probably demanded by the part she plays in the production of the species, a part altogether more prolonged and exhausting than that of the man who, when fertilization is ac- complished, has no more to do, while then the travaiT of woman begins, to continue during long months, through pregnancy and after birth. The women of savage tribes suckle their children for two years and more. It sometimes happens * The latest observations upon ants and bees tend to prove that the fertilized egrss would grive birth to females and to workers; and the nonfertilized to males, which consequently would be born from esrss that are less complex. y Google 126 THE WOMAN QUESTION that the male pays dear for his inutility; after union, the bees kill the males, and the male spider must hastily take himself off that he may not be devoured by the larger and stronger female. Among the Sakawas, at the annual feast of My- litta Anaitis, they sacrificed at Babylon the hand- some slave who had just united with the priestess who incarnated the Assyrian goddess. This bloody religious ceremonial must have been a re- production of an Amazonian custom. The life of savagery and barbarism permits woman to develop her superiority from birth; each sex there has its special function; it is the division of labor in embryo. The man, whose muscular system is more developed, "fights, hunts, fishes and sits down,'* according to the Australian native, he regards all the rest as un- der the jurisiliction of woman, whose function puts brain activity into play at an earlier epoch. She has charge of the communal house, which often shelters a clan of more than one hundred individuals ; she prepares clothing from skins and other raw materials ; she charges herself with the cultivation of the garden, the rearing of domestic animals and the manufacture of household uten-- sils ; she preserves, economizes, cooks, distributes the provisions, vegetable and animal, which have been gathered during the course of the year ; and Digitized by VjOOQIC THE WOMAN QUESTION 12? like the Valkyries of the Scandinavians and the Keres of the pre-Homeric Greeks, she accom- panies the warrior on the field battle, aids in the fray, raises him up if he is wounded and cares for him; her assistance is so appreciated that, according to Tacitus, the barbarians who under the leadership of Civilis revolted against Vespasian, were seized with pity for the Roman soldiers because their wives did not accompany them when they marched to combat. Plato like- wise who, like the chosen ones initiated in the Eleusinian Mysteries, was more informed re- garding ancient customs than is supposed, makes the women to be present in the battles of the warriors of his Republic. These multiple and diverse functions, which obliged woman to reflect, to calculate, to think of the morrow and to look ahead at long range, must necessarily have developed her intellectual faculties; thus the craniologists say that only a slight difference exists between the cranial capa- city of the two sexes in the negroes, the Austral- ians, and the red skins, while they find that it goes on increasing among civilized people. Wo- man is for the careless and improvident savage, a providence; she is the prudent and prescient being who presides over his destinies from birth to death. Man, making his religions with the Digitized by VjOOQIC 128 THE WOMAN QUESTION events and the intellectual acquisitions of his daily life, was thus obliged to begin by deifying woman. The pre-Homeric Greeks and Romans had placed their destinies under the control of goddesses, the Fates — Moirai, Parcae — whose name signifies in the Latin language "sparing," "economic," and in the Greek the part which falls to each one in the distribution of food or of booty. If we relieve the rich and poetical Greek myth- ology of the symbolical, allegorical and myst- ical lucubrations with which the philosophers and the poets of the classical epoch and the Alexan- drine period have overloaded and complicated it, and which the German mythologists, servilely copied by those of France and England, have carried on to their own more perfect confusion, it becomes an inestimable storehouse of prehis- toric customs which preserves the memory of the manners which travelers and anthropologists now observe living again among the savages and barbarous nations of Africa and the New World. The mythological legend furnishes us with in- formation of the relative value of feminine and masculine intelligence among the Greeks, before they had entered upon the patriarchal period. Jupiter, the "father of the gods," as Homer, Hesiod and Aeschylos call him, after having Digitized by VjOOQIC THE WOMAN QUESTION 129 driven the feminine divinities from Olympus, en- throned there the patriarchate, which for some generations had been established upon earth ; the religious heaven always reflects terrestrial man- ners as the moon reflects the light of the sun. But Jupiter, who like every barbarian, knew how to use his fists (Iliad XV. 228}, who boasted that he was the strongest of the gods, and who to dominate the others kept next his throne two servants, Force and Violence, always ready to obey his orders, was inadequately prepared by his intellectual qualities to replace woman in the government of the 01)mipian family; in order to supply the capacities which were lacking to him, Hesiod tells us that he married Metis, ^'the wisest among mortals and gods/' The savage and the barbarian, that he may take into himself the courage of a fallen enemy, devours his throb- bing heart ; Jupiter carried off Metis to assimilate her cunning, her prudence and her wisdom, for her name in the Greek language has these diverse meanings ; these qualities were considered as be- longing to woman. But the process of assimilation took some time, if we may judge from the rascally farce played upon him by Prometheus. The latter killed and butchered an enormous ox, in one pile he placed the flesh which he covered with the skin upon y Google 130 THE WOMAN QUESTION which he deposited the entrails; in another pile he put the bare bones which he adroitly con- cealed under heaps of fat. **You have divided the parts very badly/' said the father of gods and men. "Most worthy Jupiter, greatest of liv- ing gods, take the part that your wisdom coun- sels you to choose," replied the astute Prome- theus. The ruler of the heavens, listening only to his gluttony, laid both hands upon the heap of fat amid the laughter of the Olympians; his wrath was terrible when he saw the bare bones. (Theogony 435 et seq.) Such a farce would hardly have been played in the Olympian heaven had it not been that on the earth similar tests had been required to prove to the Father that his intellectual faculties did not justify him in taking the place of the Mother in the leader- ship of the family and the management of its property. The higher position in the family and society, which man conquered by brute force, while it compelled him to a mental activity to which he was little accustomed, at the same time put at his disposal opportunities for reflection and de- velopment which constantly increased. Woman, "subdued," as the Greek expression has it, shut up in the narrow circle of the family, the leader- ship of which had been taken from her, and y Google THE WOMAN QUESTION 131 having little or no contact with the outside world, saw on the contrary a great reduction of the means of development which she had enjoyed, and to complete her subjection she was forbid- den the intellectual culture which was given to man. If in spite of these fetters and these dis- advantages, the disastrous effects of which can- not be exaggerated, the brain of woman con- tinued to evolve, it was because woman's intel- ligence profited through the progress realized by the masculine brain; for one sex transmits to the other the qualities which it has acquired; thus pullets of certain varieties inherit the spurs which are highly developed among the cocks, while in other varieties they transmit to the males their exaggerated crests. "It is fortunate," says Darwin upon this point, "that the equal trans- mission of the characteristics of both sexes has been a general rule in the whole series of mam- mals, otherwise, it is probable that man would have become as superior to woman in intellectual power as the peacock is to the female in orna- mental plumage." (Descent of Man — Sexual Selection, VIII and XIX.) But defects as well as valuable qualities are transmitted from one sex to the other : if woman has profited by the brain-growth of man, he has in his turn been retarded in his development by y Google 132 THE WOMAN QUESTION the sluggishness in the development of woman's brain, produced by the reduction to the smallest minimum of intellectual activity to which he has condemned her. The breeders who seek the choicest results are as careful to have irreproach- able females as males; amateur cockfighters at- tach as much importance to the selection of the pullets as to the cocks, they produce only from those which are armed with spurs and which have the fighting spirit. It may be said that hu- manity, since it emerged from communism of the clan to live under the system of private prop- erty, has been developed by the efforts of one sex alone and that its evolution has been retarded through the obstacles interposed by the other sex. Man by systematically depriving woman of the means of development, material and intellect- ual, has made of her a force retarding human progress. In fact if we study and compare the different periods of savagery and barbarism, we cannot but observe the continuous and remarkable prog- ress in human mind, because women and men, exercising freely their physical and mental fac- ulties, contribute equally to the evolution of the species ; this has been retarded ever since human- ity entered into the period of civilization and private property, because then woman, constraia- y Google THE WOMAN QUESTION 133 ed and confined in her development, cannot con- tribute to it in so effective a way. The senile stagnation in which China has vegetated for more than a thousand years can only be attrib- uted to the degradation of woman, which has gone to the point of the cruel mutilation of her feet that she may be imprisoned the more closely m the woman's quarters. Europe also suffers from the degradation of woman, since in spite of the extraordinary material progress of these last two thousand years and the increasing and no less extraordinary accumulation of human knowledge, it cannot be maintained that the brain of the civilized modern exceeds in power and capacity that of the Greeks of the classic epoch, which extends from the seventh to the fourth century before the Christian era. It is certain that a Victor Hugo, a Zola, or any university graduate or doctor has stored in his brain an abundance of positive and diversified conceptions not possessed by Aeschylus, Anaxagoras, Prota- goras and Aristotle, but that does not prove that his imagination and his intelligence, or that of his contemporaries is more rich, more varied and more vast than that of the generations of Ionia and Attica, who were the artificers of that incom- parable budding and blossoming of science, phi- losophy, literature and art at which history marv- y Google 134 THE WOMAN QUESTION els and who reveled in that subtle and paradox- ical play of sophistical philosophy, the like of which has not again been seen. The sophists — Photagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato, etc., stated, discussed and solved the problems of *the spir- itualistic philosophy and many others besides : yet the Hellenes of Asia Minor and of Greece had emerged from barbarism only -a few centuries before. Many reasons may be cited to explain this arrest in human development, but the princi- pal one is the subjection of woman. IV. Capitalist production, which takes charge of most of the labors to which woman devoted her- self in the gentile house, has levied into its army of wage-workers in factory, shop, office and schoolroom, the wives and daughters of the working class and of the small bourgeoisie, in order to procure cheap labor. Its pressing need of intellectual capacities has set aside the vener- able and venerated axiom of masculine ethics: '^to read, write and count ought to be all of a woman's knowledge;" it has required that girls like boys be instructed in the rudiments of the sciences. The first step once taken, they could not be forbidden to enter the universities. They proved that the feminine brain, which the intel- Digitized by VjOOQIC THE WOMAN QUESTION 186 lectuals had declared a "child's brain," was as capable as the masculine brain of receiving all scientific instruction. The abstract sciences (mathematics, geometry, mechanics, etc.), the first whose study had been accessible to woman, were also the first in which they could give the measure of their intellectual capacities; they are now attacking the experimental sciences (physi- ology, physics, chemistry, applied mechanics, etc), in America and Europe there arises a throng of women who are marching on a level with men in spite of the inferiority of the con- ditions of development in which they have lived since their first infancy. As Capitalism has not snatched woman from the domestic hearth and launched her into so- cial production to emancipate her, but to exploit her more ferociously than man, so it has been careful not to overthrow the economic, legal, political and moral barriers which had been raised to seclude her in the marital dwelling. Woman, exploited by capital, endures the miser- ies of the free laborer and bears in addition her chains of the past. Her economic misery is ag- gravated; instead of being supported by her father or husband, to whose rule she still sub- mits, she is obliged to earn her living ; and under the pretext that she has fewer necessities than yGqogle 136 THE WOMAN QUESTION man, her labor is paid less; and when her daily toil in the shop, the office or school is ended, her labor in the household begins. Motherhood, the sacred, the highest of social functions, becomes in capitalistic society a cause of horrible misery, economic and physiologic. The social and eco- jiomic condition of woman is a danger for the reproduction of the species. But this crushing and pitiful condition an- nounces the end of her servitude, which begins with the establishment of private property and which can end only with its abolition. Civilized humanity, oppressed by the mechanical mode of production, turns its face toward a society, based on common property, in which woman, delivered from the economic, legal and moral chains which bind her, may develop freely her physical and in- tellectual faculties, as in the time of the com- munism of the savages. The savages, to forbid primitive promiscuity and successfully restrain the circle of sexual re- lations, found no other means than to separate the sexes; there are reasons for believing that the women took the initiative in this separation, which the specialization of their functions con- solidated and emphasized. This was manifested socially by religious ceremonials and secret lan- guages peculiar to each set and even by strug- y Google THE WOMAN QUESTION 137 gles;* and after having taken the character of violent antagonism, it ended in the brutal subjec- tion of woman, which still survives although it is progressively attenuated in proportion as the competition of the two sexes becomes more gen- eral and int^ise upon the economic field. But the modem antagonism will not end with the victory of one sex over the other, for it is one of the phenomena of the struggle of labor against capital, which will find its solution in the emanci- pation of the working class in which women as well as men are incorporated. The technique of production which tends to suppress the specialization of trades and func- tions and to replace muscular effort by attention and intellectual skill and which, the more it is perfected, mingles and confounds man and wo- man the more in social labor, will prevent the return of the conditions which in savage and barbarous nations had maintained the separation of the sexes. Common property will put an end to the economic antagonism of specialization. But if it is possible to catch a glimpse of the end of female servitude and of the antagonism^ ♦ A. W. Howlt, who observed amongr the Austral- ians a species of sexual totemism, says that it often happens that the women and men of one and the same clan flgrht, when the animal that serves as the totem for one sex is killed by the other sex. y Google 138 THE WOMAN QUESTION of the sexes and to corceive for the human spe- cies an era of incomparable bodily and mental progress, brought about by women and men of a high development in muscle and brain, it is im- possible to foresee the sexual relations of free and equal women and men who will not be united nor separated by sordid material interests and by the gross ethics engendered by such interests. But if we may judge by the present and the past, men, in whom the genetic passion is more violent and more continuous than in women — the same phenomenon is observed in the males and females of the whole animal series — will be obliged to exhibit their physical and intellectual qualities to win their sweethearts. Sexual selection, which, as Darwin has shown, fulfilled an important role in the development of the animal species and which, with rare exceptions, has ceased to play this part in the Indo-European races for aboj^t three thousand years, will again become one of the most active factors m the perfecting of the human race. Motherhood and love will permit woman to regain the higher position which she occupied in primitive societies, the memory of which ha>i been preserved by the legends and myths of the «rvV ent religions. y Google THE SOCIALIST IDEAL Our comrades in Germany were discussing some time since the question whether Socialism is a science. Socialism is not and cannot be a science for the simple reason that it is a political party and must disappear when its work is ac- complished after the abdition of the ck^ses which gave birth to it ; but the end which it pursues is scientific. Guizot, who had a vague idea of the theory of the class struggle — ^himself a product of the Rev- olution, which was a dramatic struggle between classes — said with good reason that a class can- not emancipate itself until it possesses the qual- ities requisite for taking the leadership of society ; now one of these qualities is to have a more or less definite conception of the social order which it proposes to substitute for that which is op- pressing it. This conception cannot but be a social ideal, or, to employ a scientific word, a social hypothesis; but an hypothesis, as well in the 188 y Google 140 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL natural sciences as in social science, may be Utop- ian or scientific. Socialism, because it is a political party of the oppressed class, has therefore an ideal. ït groups and organizes the efforts of the individuals who wish to build on the ruins of capitalist society, based upon individual property, an ideal or hypo- thetical society based upon common property in the means of production. Only through the class struggle can modern socialism realize its social ideal, which possesses the qualities demanded of any hypothesis that claims a scientific character. The fact of choos- ing a scientific goal, and of trying to reach it only through the class struggle, distinguishes it from the Socialism of i82j3, which was pursuing through the reconciliation of classes a social ideal which could not but be Utopian considering the historic moment in which it was conceived. Socialism has thus evolved from Utopia into sci- ence. Engels has traced the main lines of this evolution in his memorable pamphlet, '^Socialism, Utopian and Scientific." It is the same with all sciences, which begin with Utopia to arrive at positive knowledge ; this course is imposed by the very nature of the human mind. ]\Ian progresses in social life as in intellectual life, only by starting from the known and travel- y Google / THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 141 ing toward the unknown, and that unknown mitst be represented by the imagination; that imag- inary conception of the unknown, which cannot but be hypothetical, is one of the most powerful incentives to action, it is the very condition of every forward step. It is natural that men like Bernstein in Germany and Jaurès in France should seek to domesticate Socialism and to put it in tow of liberalism, accusing it of hypnotis- ing its soldiers with an ideal of the year 3000, which makes them live in the expectation of a Messianic "catastrophe" and reject the imme- diate advantages of an understanding and co- operation with bourgeois parties, and which blinds them to their shocking errors regarding the concentration of wealth, the disappearance of small industry and the middle class, the increase of class antagonisms, the spreading and intens- ification of the misery of the working class, etc. These errors may have been plausible hypotheses before 1848, but since then events have shown their falsity. This unfortunate ideal prevents them from descending from the revolutionary heights to accept the responsibilities of power and of setting aside the cause, of labor to devote themselves entirely tongue and pen, to the re- habilitation of a millipnaire leader; it obliges them to oppose all exterior policies and acts, to y Google 142 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL vote not a cent nor a soldier for colonial expedi- tions, which carry labor, Christianity, syphilis and the alcoholism of civilization to the barbaric tribes. The neo-methodists of the ancient and outworn gospel of the brotherhood of classes advise the socialists to suppress their ideal, or, since it unfortunately captivates the masses of the people, to speak of it without caring for it, as Jaurès does, that they may consecrate them- selves to practical necessities, to the vast plans of agricultural and industrial co-operation, to popular universities, etc. The dilettantes of politics, these practical groundlings of opportunism, nevertheless hold themselves up for transcendent idealists and march with their eyes fixed upon the stars, be- cause they substitute for ideas a brilliant or- chestra of sonorous words and eternal principles. These bourgeois idealists edge their way in everywhere; after the Revolution of 1789 they rebuked the scientists for their hypotheses and their theories; according to them science should have stopped with the study of facts in them- selves without dreaming of uniting them into a general system. "What is the use of cutting stones without putting up a building," replied Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, the genial disciple of Lamarck, who lived to see the extinction of his y Google THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 143 theory ,on the continuity of specie*}, which, only thirty years after his death, was to take on a new birth with Darwin. They are still reproach- ing the physiologists for waiting their time in elaborating hypotheses which ^ast on an average only three years and which cannot explain what takes place in a /miscle which contracts and in a brain which thinks. They grumble against the hypotheses of the physicists, who do not know the real nature of elasticity, of elec- trical conductivity, or even^ what happens when a particle of sugar is dissolved. They would like to prphibit scientists from any speculation be- cause it is disastrous and may lead into error. But the latter protest and declare that imagina- tion is one of the first and most indispensable faculties of the scientist, and that the hypotheses to which they give birth, even though they be erroneous and able to survive only three years, are nevertheless the necessary condition of all scientific progress. If the communist ideal were an hypothesis undemonstrable and false it would still be a pro- pelling force of social progress, but such is not the case. The hypothesis in science, as in the social field, is the more undemonstrable and susceptible of error in proportion as the data contributing y Google 144 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL to its elaboration are less numerous and more uncertain. Greek science, which had to furnish a conception of the world when the data regard- ing the phenomena of nature were of the most rudimentary, was obliged to resort to hypotheses which for boldness and intuitive accuracy are marvels of history and of thought ; after having admitted, according to the vulgar opinion, that t)ie earth was flat, and that the temple of Delphi was situated at its center, they put forth the hypothesis of its spherical form, then tmdemon- strable. Socialism, which dates from the first years of the nineteenth century, started, like Greek science, from hypotheses the more erroneous, and from ideal the more Utopian, in that the so- cial world which it proposed to transform was less known; and at that epoch could not be known for the excellent reason that it was in course of formation. The machine operated by steam was beginning to edge into industry where the tool, managed by the artisan, was moved by human power, and in some rare circumstances by animals, wind or waterfalls. The Socialist thinkers, as Engels observes, were then obliged to draw from their own brain the social ideal which they could not extract from the tumultuous economic environ- y Google THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 145 ment in full course of transformation. They grasped again, infusing new life into it, the com- munist ideal which has slumbered in the mind of man since he emerged from the communism of primitive society which the poetic Greek myth- ology calls the golden age and which has awak- ened to shine here and there with a glorious splendor at great epochs of social upheaval. They sought, then, to establish communism, not because the economic environment was ready for its introduction, but because men were miser- able, because the laws of justice and equalitv Wore violated, because the precepts of the Christ could not be followed in their purity. The com- ^munistic ideal, not springing from economic reality, was then but an unconscious reminiscence of a prehistoric past, and came only from ideal- istic notions upon a justice, an equality and a gospel law no less idealistic ; it is then idealistic in the second degree, and consequently Utopian. The Socialists of the first half of the nine- teenth century, who rekindled the communist ideal, had the rare merit of giving it a consist- ency less idealistic. They spoke little of the Christian religion, of justice and of equality; Robert Owen laid the responsibilities of social evils upon the family, property and religion; Qiarles Fottrier criticises the ideas of justice and ' Digitized by VjOOQIC 146 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL morality introduced by the bourgeois Revolution of '89 with incomparable animation and irony. They did not weep over the misery of the poor, but left that to Victor Hugo and the charlatans of romanticism. They preached the social prob- lem from its realistic side, the only side from which it can be solved. They used their talents to prove that a social organization of production would succeed in satisfying the desires of all without reducing the share of any, not even that of the privileged capitalist class. Meanwhile the recent application of steam and machinery de- manded also a new organization of labor, and this was the constant concern of the industrial bourgeoisie. The socialists were thus pursuing the same end as the industrials; bourgeois and socialists might consequently come to an under- standing. We therefore find in the socialist sects of that epoch industrials, engineers and financi- ers who in the second half of the century cast away their sympathy for the workers and occu- pied an important place in capitalist society. The socialism of that epoch could not under* these conditions be an)rthing else than pacific; instead of entering on the struggle with the capitalists, the socialists thought only of con- verting them to their system of social reform from which they were to be the first to benefit. Digitized by VjOOQIC THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 147 They proclaimed the association of capital, in- telligence and labor, the interests of which, ac- cording to them, were identical! they preached a mutual understanding between the employer and the employed, between the exploiter and the exploited; they know no class struggle; they condemned strikes and all political agitation, especially if it were revolutionary; they desired order in the street and harmony in the work- shop. They demanded, finally, nothing more than was desired by the new industrial bour- geoisie. ^ They foresaw that industry, strengthened by the motive power of steam, machinery and the concentration of the instruments of labor, would have a colossal producing power, and they had the simplicity to believe that the capitalists would content themselves with taking only a reasonable part of the wealth thus created, and would leave to their co-operators, the manual and intellectual laborers, a portion sufficient to enable them to live in comfort. This sociaHsm was marvellously agreeable to capital, since it promised an in- crease of wealth and advised an understanding between the laborer and the employer. It re- cruited the great majority of its adepts in the educational hotbeds of the bourgeoisie. It was y Google 148 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL Utopian, therefore it was the socialism of the intellectuals. But precisely because it >vas Utopian, the la- borers, in constant antagonism with their em- ployers on questions of labor and hours, looked on it with suspicion. They could understand no- thing of this socialism which condemned strikes ;nd political action and which assumed to har- monize the interests of capital and labor, of the exploiter and exploited. They kept aloof from the socialists and gave all their sympathies to the bourgeois republicans, because they were revolutionary. They joined their secret societies and climbed with them upon the barricades to make riots and political revolutions. Marx and Engels took socialism at the point to which the great Utopians had brought it, but instead of torturing their brains to improvise the organization of labor and of production, they studied that which was already created by the very necessities of the new mechanical industry which had arrived at a degree of development sufficient to permit its power and its tendency to be apparent. Its productivity was so enorm- ous, as Fourier and Saint Simon had foreseen, that it was capable of providing abundantly for the normal needs of all the members of society. This was the first time in history that such a y Google THE SOCIALIST IDEAL " l49 productive power had been observed, and it was because capitalist production could satisfy all needs, and for that reason alone, that it is pos- sible to reintroduce communism, that is to say the equal participation of all in sQcial wealth, and the free and complete development of the physical, intellectual and moral faculties. Com- munism is no longer a Utopia but a possibility. Machinery replaces the individualistic produc- tion of the small industry, by the communistic production of the capitalistic factory, but prop- erty in the means of labor has remained individ- ual, as in the time of the small industry. There is then a contradiction between the individual- istic mode of possession and the communist mode of production and this contradiction translates itself into the antagonism between the laborer and the capitalist employer. The producers, who form the immense majority of the nation, no longer possess the instruments of labor, the pos- session of which is centralized in the idle hands of a decreasing minority. The social problem imposed by mechanical production will be solved, as the social problems imposed by preceding modes of production have been solved, by precip- itating the evolution begun by economic force, by finishing the expropriation of the individual in the means of production, by giving to the Digitized by VjOOQIC 15^ THE SOCIALIST IDEAL communistic mode of production the commun- istic mode of possession which it demands. The communism of contemporary sociaUsts no longer proceeds, Hke that of former times, from the cerebral lucubrations of gifted thinkers; it proceeds from economic reality, it is the final goal of the economic forces which, without at- tracting the attention of the capitalists and their intellectuals, have fashioned the communistic mold of a new society, the coming of which we only have to hasten. Communism, then, is no longer a Utopian hypothesis; it is a scientific ideal. It may be added that never has the eco- nomic structure of /any society been better and more completely analyzed than capitalist society, and that never was a social ideal conceived with such numerous and positive data as the com- munist idea of modern socialism. Although it is the economic forces which fash- ion men at the pleasure and spur them to ac- tion, and although these constitute the myster- ious 'force determining the great currents of his- tory which the Christians attribute to God, and the free-thinking bourgeois assign to Progress, to Civilization, to the Immortal Principles and other similar manitous, worthy of savage tribes, they are nevertheless the product of human act- ivity. Man, who created them and brought them Digitized by VjOOQIC THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 151 into the world, has thus far let himself be guided by them; yet now that he has understood their nature and grasped their tendency, he can act upon their evolution. The socialists who are ac- cused of being stricken by Oriental fatalism and of relying upon the good pleasure of economic forces to bring to light the communist society instead of crossing their arms like the fakirs of official Economics, and of bending the knee be- fore its fundamental dogma, laisses faire, laisses passer, propose on the contrary to subdue them, as the blind forces of nature have been subdued, and force them to do good to men instead of leaving them to work misery to the toilers of civilization. They do not wait for their ideal ■"to fall from heaven as the Christians hope ^or the grace of God, and the capitalists for wealth ; they prepare, on the contrary, to realize it, not by appealing to the intelligence of the capital- ist class and to its sentiments of justice and hu- manity, but by fighting it, by expropriating it from its political power, which protects its eco- nomic despotism. Socialism, because it possesses a social ideal, has in consequence a criticism of its own. Every class which struggles for its enfranchisement seeks to realize a social ideal, in complete oppo- sition with that of the ruling class. The strug- Digitized by VjOOQIC 168 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL gle is waged at first in the ideological world be- fore the physical shock of the revolutionary bat- tle. It thus begins the criticism of the ideas of the society which must be revolted against, for ''the ideas of the ruling class are the ideas of society," or these ideas are the intellectual re- flection of its material interests. Thus, the wealth of the ruling class is -pro- duced by slave labor ; religion, ethics, philosophy and literature agree in authorizing slavery. The ugly God of the Jews and Christianity strikes with his curse the progeny of Ham, that it may furnish slaves. Aristotle, the encyclopedic thinker of Greek philosophy, declares that slaves are predestined by nature and that no rights exist for them, for there can be no rights except be- tween equals. Euripides in his tragedies preaches the doctrine of servile morality; St. Paul, St. Augustine and the Church feach slaves submis- sion to their earthly masters that they may de- serve the favor of their heavenly master; Chris- tian civilization introduced slavery into America and maintains it there until economic phenom- ena prove that slave labor is a method of exploi- tation more costly and less profitable than free labor. At the epoch when the Greco-Roman civiliza- tion was dissolving, when the labor of artisans y Google THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 153 and free workers began to be substituted for slave labor, pagan religion, philosophy and liter- ature decided to accord them certain rights. The same Euripides who advised the slave to lose his personality in that of the master does not wish him to be despised. "There is nothing- shameful in slavery but the name,*' says the peda- gogue in Ion, "the slave, moreover, is not in- ferior to the free man when he has a noble hearti" The mysteries of Eleusis and of Or- phism; like Christianity, which continues their work, admit slaves among their initiated and promise them liberty, equality and happiness after death. The dominating class of the Middle Ages be- ing military, the Christian religion and social ethics condemned lending money at interest, and covered the lender with infamy; to take interest for money loaned was then something so ignom- inious that the Jewish race, obliged to specialize itself in the trade of money, still bears the shame of it. But to-day, now that the Christians have become Jews, and the ruling class lives on the interest of its capital, the trade of the lender at interest is the most honorable, the most de- sirable, the most exclusive. The oppressed class, although the ideology of the oppressing class is imposed upon it, never- y Google 164 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL theless elaborates religious, ethical and political ideas corresponding to its condition of life; vague and secret at first, they gain in precision and force in proportion as the oppressed class takes definite form and acquires the conscious- ness of its social utility and of its strength; and the hour of its emancipation is near when its conception of nature and of society opposes it- self openly and boldly to that of the ruling class. The economic conditions in which the bour- geois moves and evolves make of it a class es- sentially religious. Christianity is its work and will last as long as this class shall rule society. Seven or eight centuries before Christ, when the bourgeoisie had its birth in the commercial and industrial cities of the Mediterranean sea, we may observe the elaboration of a new reli- gion; the gods of paganism created by warrior tribes could not be suited to a class consecrated to the production and sale of merchandise. Mys- terious cults (the mysteries of the Cabiri, of Demeter, of Dionysus, etc.) revive the religi- ous traditions of the prehistoric matriarchical period; the idea of a soul and its existence after death revive; the idea of posthumous punish- ments and rewards to compensate for acts of so- cial injustice are introduced, etc. These religious elements, combined with the intellectual data of Digitized by VjOOQIC THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 155 Greek philosophy, contribute to form Christian- ity, the religion, par excellence, of societies which have for their foundation property belonging to the individual and the class which enrich them- selves by the exploitation of wage labor. For fifteen centuries all the movements of the bour- geoisie, either for organization, or for selfeman- cipation, or for the acquisition of power have been accompanied and complicated by religious crises ; but always Christianity more or less mod- ified remains the religion of society. The revolu- tionists of 1789, who in the ardor of the struggle promised themselves to de-Christianize France, were eager when the bourgeoisie were victorious to raise again the altars they had overthrown and to reintroduce the cult that they had proscribed. The economic environment which produces the proletariat relieves it on the contrary from every idea of sentiment. There is not seen either in Europe nor in America among the laboring masses of the great industries any anxiety to elaborate a religion to replace Christianity, nor any desire to reform it.^ The economic and polit- ical organizatons of the working class are com- pletely uninterested as to any doctrinal discus- sion of religious and spiritual dogmas, although they combat the priests of all cults because they are the lackeys of the capitalist class. y Google 166 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL The victory of the proletariat will deliver hu- manity from the nightmare of religion. The be- lief in superior beings to explain the natural world and the social inequality, and to prolong the dominion of the ruling class, and the belief in the posthumous existence of the soul to re- compense the inequality of fate will have no more justification once man, who has already grasped the general causes of the phenomena of nature, shall live in a communist society from whence shall have disappeared the inequality and the injustice of capitalistic society. The militant socialists, following the example of the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, have to make a merciless criticism of the eco- nomic, political, historical, philosophical, moral and religious ideas of the capitalist class in order to prepare in all spheres of thought the triumph of the new ideology which the proletariat intro- duces into the world. y Google THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN Capitalist Civilization has endowed the wage- worker with the metaphysical Rights of Man, but this is only to rivet him more closely and more firmly to his economic duty. "I make you free," so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, "free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you teq hours or twelve hours in his workshops ; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down your soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes. Progress and Civilization may be hard on wage-working humanity, but they have all a mother's tenderness for the animals which stupid bipeds call "lower.'* y Google 168 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE . Civilization has i especially favored the equine race : it would be too great a task to go through the long list of its benefactions ; I will name but a few, of general notoriety, that I may awaken and inflame the passionate desires of the work- ers, now torpid in their misery. Horses are divided into distinct classes. The equine aristocracy enjoys so many and so op- pressive privileges, that if the human-faced brutes which serve them as jockeys, trainers, stable valets and grooms were not morally de- graded to the point of not feeling their shame, they would have rebelled against their lords and masters, whom they rub down, groom, brush and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up their excrements and receiving bites and kicks by way of thanks. Aristocratic horses, like capitalists, do not work; and when they exercise themselves in the fields they look disdainfully, with a coupon- clipper's contempt, upon the human animals which plow and seed the lands, mow and rake the meadows, to provide them with oats, clover, timothy and other succulent plants* These four-footed favorites of Civilization command such social influence that they impose their wills upon the capitalists, their brothers in privilege ; they force the loftiest of them to come Digitized by VjOOQIC THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE 159 with their beautiful ladies and take tea in the stables, inhaling the acrid perfumes of their solid and liquid evacuations. And when these lords consent to parade in public, they require from ten to twenty thousand men and women to stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats, un- der the broiling sun, to admire their exquisitely chiseled forms and their feats of running and leaping. They respect none of the social dignities before which the votaries of the Rights of Man bow in reverence. At Chantilly not long ago one of the favorites for the grand prize launched a kick at the king of Belgium, because it did not like the looks of his head. His royal majesty, who adores horses, murmured an apology and withdrew. It is fortunate that these horses, who can count more authentic ancestors than the houses of Or- leans and Hohenzollern, have not been corrupted by their high social station: had they taken it into their heads to rival the capitalists in aesth- etic pretentions, profligate luxury and depraved tastes, such as wearing lace and diamonds, and drinking champagne and Chateau-Margaux, a blacker misery and more overwhelming drudgery would be impending over the class of wage- workers. Thrice happy is it for proletarian humanity Digitized by VjOOQIC 160 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE that these equine aristocrats have not taken the fancy of feeding upon human flesh, like the old Bengal tigers which rove around the villages of India to carry off women and children; if un- happily the horses had been man-eaters, the capi- talists, who can refuse them nothing, would have built slaughter-houses for wage-workers, where they could carve out and dress boy sirloins, wo- man hams and girl roasts to satisfy their an- thropophagie tastes. The proletarian horses, not so well endowed, have to work for their peck of oats, but the capi- talist class, through deference for the aristocrats of the equine race, concedes to the working horses rights that are far more solid and real than those inscribed in the '^Rights of Man/' The first of rights, the right to existence, which no civilized society will recognize for la- borers, is possessed by horses. The colt, even before his birth, while still in the fetus state, begins, to enjoy the right to ex- istence; his mother, when her pregnancy has scarcely begun, is discharged from all work and sent into the country to fashion ^the new being in peace and comfort; she remains near him to suckle him and teach him to choose the delicious grasses of the meadow, in which he gambols un- til he is grown. y Google THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE 161 The moralists and politicians of the "Rights of Man'' think it would be monstrous to grant such rights to the laborers; I raised a tempest in the Chamber of Deputies when I asked that women, two months before and two months after confinement, should have the right and the means to absent themselves from the factory. My pro- position upset the ethics of civilization and shook the capitalist order. What an abominable abomi- nation — to demand for babies the rights of colts. As for the young proletarians, they can scarce- ly trot on their little toes before they are con- demned to hard labor in the prisons of capital- ism, while the colts develop freely under kindly Nature; care is taken that they be completely formed before they are set to work, and their tasks are proportioned to their strength with a tender care. This care on the part of the capitalists follows them all through their lives. We may still recall the noble indignation of the bourgeois press when it learned that the omnibus company was using peat and tannery waste in its stalls as a substitute for straw: to think of the unhappy horses having such poor litters ! The more del- icate souls of the bourgeoisie have in every capi- talist country organized societies for the protec- tion of animals, in order to prove that they can Digitized by VjOOQIC 162 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE not be excited by the fate of the small victims of industry. Schopenhauer, the bourgeois philo- sopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the gross egoism of the philistine, could not hear the cracking of a whip without his heart being torn by it. This same omnibus company, which works its laborers from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, requires from its dear horses only five to seven hours. It has bought green meadows in which they may recuperate from fatigue or indisposi- tion. Its policy is to expend more for the enter- tainment of a quadruped than for paying the wages of a biped. It has never occurred to any legislator nor to any fanatical advocate of the "Rights of Man'' to reduce the horse's daily pit- tance in order to assure him a retreat that would be of service to him only after his death. The Rights of Horses have not been posted up; they' are "unwritten rights," as Socrates called the laws implanted by Nature in the con- sciousness of all men. The horse has shown his wisdom in content- ing himself with these rights, with no thought of demanding those of the citizen ; he has judged that he would have been as stupid as man if he had sacrificed his mess of lentils for the meta- physical banquet of Rights to Revolt, to Equal- y Google THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE 163 ity, to Liberty, and other trivialities which to the proletariat are about as useful as a cautery on a wooden leg. ^ Civilization, though partial to the equine race, has not shown herself indifferent to the fate of the other animals. Sheep, like canons, pass their days in pleasant and plentiful idleness; they are fed in the stable on barley, lucerne, rutabagas and other roots, raised by wage-workers; shep- herds coftduct them to feed in fat pastures, and when the sun parches the plain, they are carried to where they can browse on the tender grass of the mountains. ' The Church, which has burned her heretics» and regrets that she can not again bring up her faithful sons in the love of "mutton," represents Jesus, under the form of a kind shepherd, bear- ing upon his shoulders a weary lamb. True, the love for the ram and the ewe is in the last analysis only the love for the leg of mut- ton and the cutlet, just as the Liberty of the Rights of Man is nothing but the slavery of the wage- worker, sin,ce our Jesuitical Civilization al- ways disguises capitalist exploitation in eternal principles and bourgeois egoism in noble senti- ments; yet at least the bourgeois tends and fat- tens the sheep up to the day of the sacrifice, while he seizes the laborer still warm from the Digitized by Google 164 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE workshop and lean from toil to send him to the shambels of Tonquin or Madagascar. Laborers of all crafts, you who toil so hard to create your poverty in producing the wealth of the capitalists, arise, arise! Since the buf- foons of parliament unfurl the Rights of Man, do you boldly demand for yourselves, your wives and your children the Rights of the Horse. THE END. y Google y Google y Google y Google